coverage of the events in the United States and in Saudi Arabia. Of course, there was a great deal more coverage of Columbine in the United States, as there will always be more coverage of an event the closer that one gets to the place where it occurred. There is nothing surprising or even terribly remarkable about this and so it shall not be a focus of this paper. Instead, the differing content of the coverage in the two countries shall be examined.
Saudi Arabia, being a smaller country than the United States, has far fewer newspapers, only about a dozen (including several in English) compared to the hundreds of newspapers in the United States. The United States has newspapers published in a variety of languages to reflect the great diversity of this country of immigrants.
In Saudi Arabia, the government operates radio and television broadcasting services, with several million radios and television receivers in use and well over 1 million telephones, meaning that many Saudis now have access to foreign media coverage of events through the Internet or through fax service. Unlike the generation before them, todayÆs Saudis have a much greater chance to be able to learn about the world both from inside their own culture and by viewing it through the eyes of people across the globe, which has at least in some ways produced a sense of technologically induced cultural relativism (Kelly, 1998, p. 37).
To understand the place of the media within Saudi Arabia one must first understand a little about the overall political structure of the country. Saudi Arabia is a monarchy with a government based on the Sharia, the sacred law of Islam, which is interpreted according to the strict Hanbali rite by the learned religious elders, or ulama. Saudi Arabia had no written constitution until March 1992, when a series of royal decrees established a bill of rights, increased the powers of provincial governments, and provided for a 60-member Consul...