Why are most US news programs silent about Iran-Saudi deal announced at Beijing on March 10th?

Question

Saudi Arabia, Iran restore relations in a deal brokered by China on March 10th. Now 3 days have passed, but I only saw MSNBC and BBC briefly reported it on their TV programs once. All the other news programs seem to be silent about it.

But shouldn't this be reported/discussed heavily as it is such a big deal? Just because China plays a significant role so they do not want to report it? That does not make sense, but I guess that is probably the reason (sour grapes).

If I remember correctly, the murder of a Saudi dissident journalist or the story of Iranian morality police was reported extensively on TV, so to me it is not that they don't like to report the story from Saudi or Iran.

--- Update ---

From the answers and comments I got, I think I need to emphasize two things. First, my question is specially about TV coverage, not about digital print coverage. Before I asked the question I already read some articles mentioned in one of the answers. Second, I am reluctant to (and I don't) use the term 'western media', because I don't think such things exist or it is too broad term to conveying any meaningful discussion. Can you image to put Fox news and CNN or The New York Times together to talk about Middle East peace or ...?

PS, this is CNN world news on YouTube today (3.14), so you can see it covers a lot, two reports about China, not no Iran and Saudi deal. I am hesitated to use CNN as an example because I have seen that sidetracked my question. As someone grew up in 80s, I am more interested in using Big Three (NBC,CBS,ABC) as an example, but it is easies to get CNN news link on youtube.

--- update 2 ---

My question is about US new programs but let me talk about BBC here as a supplement to my question. I probably would agree with one comment that "BBC is the best international news service in the world" but I came across this tweet,

BBC newsroom staff are super-transparent about their drive to downplay or totally delete any positive news about China. It's actually quite funny!

I never heard this guy Nury Vittachi or Fridayeveryday.com before. From this website it said "Nury Vittachi is one of Asia’s most widely published authors, and emeritus chairman of Asia-Pacific’s biggest association of writers." I don't know whether all these claims are true or not, and that is why I update my question again.

Answer 1

I think this gets a bit more oversold in China, relative to the US, that's why you're so surprised. Coverage does exist, at least in [digital] "print", sometimes actually quite laudatory of China, in fact

• https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-brokered-deal-between-iran-saudi-arabia-marks-a-new-middle-east-d1eaf94e
• https://time.com/6262251/saudi-iran-china-diplomacy/ "Diplomatic Triumph for China"
• https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/11/us/politics/saudi-arabia-iran-china-biden.html "Iran-Saudi Pact Is Brokered by China, Leaving U.S. on Sidelines"
• https://www.npr.org/2023/03/10/1162562242/saudi-arabia-iran-relations-china-analysis "Rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran restore ties, with China's help. Here's why it matters"

Mutual re-opening of embassies is not that big of deal IMHO given that the two are still backing opposite sides in the Yemen war, which only has a ceasefire... which was established many months ago (and somewhat holds, despite officially expiring). Also asked here why it matters.

Besides, recall that Saudis broke ties with Qatar too (a year after some Iranians invaded the Saudi embassy.) And the Saudis restored them with Qatar in 2021, but I don't recall any big TV news coverage in the West about that either. So it's not like they are shunning China in particular on this.

Also consider for actual TV coverage length the telegenicity of the event. There's not a lot to show besides a 3-way handshake. Even al-Jazeera's coverage in English is like 1-minute long, AFAICT. Yeah, al-J does have a 30-minute analysis with panelists etc. Western media hardly ever has something like that for anything Middle East. (DW has like 5-min coverage.)

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BTW, the Khashoggi story was incredibly well managed by... Erdogan. Leaks after leaks, after teasers fed to the press kept the attention up etc.

The core of the strategy was a daily series of leaks by unnamed officials to correspondents based in Istanbul, especially U.S. journalists, to ensure that the issue remained in headlines

Also Khashoggi wasn't just some Saudi dissident. He also had Western journalist credentials, so he was much relatable on the level of "shock, horror, Saudi regime kills an [almost] Westerner". Even though this happened in Turkey, coverage was [thus] about par with what I saw for novichok assassinations etc.

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Finally, you are partly mistaken with respect to CNN's TV coverage of the event. They do have it on "Connect with Becky Anderson", albeit uploaded on CNN.com belatedly on March 13, but the show's FB page has it posted on March 10, which was probably the air date.

This show seems to air only on CNN International though, but I think not on CNN US. That it wasn't uploaded (at all) to their YouTube channel is a different matter. BTW, the show's FB also has a follow-up commentary segment on March 13.

So possibly CNN did intentionally minimize coverage to their US TV viewers. I don't see much attempt to minimize coverage on their web site though, it was among the top stories today in the "world" section and the top story in the Middle East section, even today:

By the way, Fox News didn't miss the opportunity to cover it, and criticized Biden in the process as well, with at least 2 TV segments, a couple of days ago (and possibly even before, but I didn't check further back).

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One interesting point in a discussion like this, how many Americans are still getting their news from TV:

Answer 2

In addition to my comments that suggest part of this is American News Media has a historically poor record for covering international stories unless it is a tragedy OR involves U.S. interests in some way. Additionally, it wouldn't be seen as a terrible blow to U.S. Diplomacy because the U.S. does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, so it wouldn't be in a position to broker a peace agreement to reopen embassies when they don't have an embassy with one of the major players in the deal.

Additionally, it likely fell victim to "Friday News" curse. This isn't just an American News Media unique problem, but typically news stories that occur on Fridays tend to get disproportionally low coverage because people tend to not watch the news on the weekend, meaning that a story which might live for a day and a half on the regular news cycle will have to survive 2-days with little attention until Monday Morning. It's not uncommon for governments around the world to release bad news on a Friday in order for the bad news to be ignored for two days so that they don't have people who bothered to read and report on the bad news to have a public interest in following the story (They also do this during other major distractions. The U.K. government had a minor scandal when government memos were advising departments to release any "bad news" they had during the 9/11 attacks and days following, since those reports would not be a priority for the press for the obvious reasons.).

In all likelihood the fact that the deal was made on a Friday diminished any interest it would have gotten had it happened earlier in the week from other western media.

While it's likely that politics of various news media outlets played a part in the downplayed coverage, it's more likely that the above marketing and time factors contributed more than anything else.

Answer 3

It seems that CNN finds movies more important than Chinese foreign policy. Look what they talk about:

• SVB,
• Ukraine,
• Oscars,
• the Jan 6th riots,
• and, somewhere in the depth of the site, Iran-Saudi-China.

Answer 4

Your premise is flawed.

Cable news is not the be-all and end-all of western news.

This has been receiving enough exposure to be a top news item in Google News continually since the moment it dropped. It is getting plenty of exposure.

The coverage has actually shifted into the second wave of analysis instead of reporting by now.

Here's CNN

The Slate

The Guardian

And an editorial from the Wall Street Journal

Answer 5

See also: Why is the media concerned about the sharia and the treatment of women in Afghanistan, but not in Saudi Arabia?

The reason is the same - ultimately the news agency needs to focus on what their viewers want to know about and/or are interested in. This is measured in terms of clicks. Every time you click on a link about X topic, you tell the website that you are interested in that topic. If for example the website gets:

• Articles on topic A gets 50,000 views
• Articles on topic B gets 5,000 views

Then it will quite sensibly focus on topic A. It will assign more journalists to cover topic A than B. It may or may not neglect topic B entirely (that depends on whether it counts 5000 as significant enough to bother), but it will cover B less than A.

When faced with new stories, the news agency will also use their judgment to decide whether the new topic is likely to generate more clicks.

That's what you're seeing. People who watch US news aren't very interested in the Iran/Saudi/China deal, so they don't report on it.

Answer 6

My guess is that the Western community is pretty perplexed about this new development. So while this is certainly an important piece of information, it cannot be celebrated, since a China-Iran-Saudi relationship is potentially a huge risk to world order—from a Western perspective.

It would help Iran evade Western sanctions and develop its military and weapons production, and China would be less afraid of sanctions—if it chooses to attack Taiwan, and the Saudis can just agree to a nuclear Iran or even buy an arsenal of their own—making the whole region more dangerous.

On the other hand, how can you denounce "Peace"? And what would the West achieve from denouncing it—as it is still trying to get the Saudis to stick with the US while absorbing rebuke on civil rights matters.

So downplaying the whole event, hoping that it won't develop into warmer ties and security cooperation, is in the best interest of the West.

In regards to internal US politics, this can be seen as another severe foreign policy failure of the Biden administration, and of the whole ideology that a weaker America is better for the World (if Ukraine and Afghanistan are not enough)—as we all know, some news outlets don't like reporting such types of information.

See https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19492/biden-pushing-arabs-towards-iran