When King Abdullah died in January, Saudi Arabia’s global image was worrisome. Some analysts considered the kingdom responsible for the sudden rise of the Islamic State, Riyadh supported Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against then-President Mohammed Morsi’s government in Egypt, and the Saudi army had been used to contain the 2011 popular uprising in Bahrain — just to mention a few controversies.
The country urgently needed to rebuild its image. When new King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud reshuffled the Saudi Cabinet in January, appointing Adel al-Turaifi as minister of culture and information, the move was interpreted as a predictable response to the aforementioned circumstances and as a change in the kingdom's cultural policies. This was particularly the case as Turaifi was described as young, liberal and a technocrat journalist. Indeed, Turaifi started his journalism career writing for Saudi newspaper Al Watan from 2002 to 2005 and then for Al Riyadh. He became editor-in-chief of London-based Majallah magazine in 2010, and then held the same position at Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in 2013. In November 2014, he was appointed general manager of the Saudi-funded Al Arabiya news channel.
