An Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It | Hacker News Reader

An Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It

nytimes.com

221 pointsdoener87 comments

FYI the documentary is called “The Dissident”, is available for purchase from January 8th on Apple TV (as per the official site: https://www.thedissident.com) and has 95% on Rotten Tomatoes (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dissident)

Already available online.

To be clear, for others confused like me, it seems like it'll be purchasable on Apple TV, not streaming on the confusingly named Apple TV+ (the streaming service).

Yeah lots of documentaries they won't show. Documentaries that tell the truth about Palestine or Saudi Arabia.

You won't read about the UK's co-ordination with Saudi Arabia in their war on Yemen, in any media there, except for UK declassified run by Mark Curtis.

This is why democratic and independent media is important.

Netflix et al. may not be "democratic," but, in what sense are they not independent? This is just showing that "independent" media isn't sufficient for these types of uncomfortable truths. Nor do I believe democratic media would be sufficient, as we've seen that almost half the US wanted to vote for a delusional, racist, fascist again, after actually seeing the results of doing so the first time.

I agree with you that what we're doing right now isn't working. I don't have a solution or a proposal, but I just don't see how there's any way for media in general to get this sort of stuff out onto the airwaves.

> but, in what sense are they not independent?

Netflix is available in 190 countries [0]. That's an advantage over a traditional distributor. But it ties their hands on what kind of content they can make. A large enough country will certainly hold sway over what's allowed to be on Netflix, even if they only air it elsewhere.

Apple TV+ is an even bigger problem because of Apple's dependence on China. Doesn't matter if Apple TV+ is even available there. It simply cannot produce content that China finds objectionable. China has chastised companies for much less [1] [2].

[0] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/14164 though it is blocked by some of those countries

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/there-are-definitely-tra...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/business/mercedes-daimler...

You do realize we're on an American website, talking about an article in an American publication about how American streaming services won't play this film, and which references the decline of "American film culture," right? I don't think 189 of those countries particularly matter for purposes of this discussion, and I don't see anyone claiming that, say, China, has any independent and democratic institutions at all, much less media.

I think he was trying to say that the NYTimes has no relevant Chinese market so it can’t be coerced by chinese regulations or threatened with a destruction of that part of their business. Global platforms can be threatened, so they adapt their content strategy.

I don't see where NYT was mentioned at all, and, as I mentioned, what Netflix and Amazon do in the other 189 countries doesn't have much to do with what they can and do do in the US.

I believe you're wrong on that last point. The Chinese market is large enough that it absolutely does impact what American media companies do, both in China and elsewhere (including within the US).

I didn't say "American media companies." I said "Netflix and Amazon." Both are perfectly capable of, and, in fact, do block certain titles in certain countries for political reasons. They certainly do it for licensing reasons, which, I suppose you can interpret as political, in a way. If they wanted to, Hulu and Disney and all the other streaming services could do the exact same thing. That was my entire point.

They're not independent in the sense that they say things like "We’re not in the truth to power business" when defending their censorship decisions (https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/7/20953210/netflix-reed-has...). They don't feel they're free to say things powerful people wouldn't like.

No, that just says they don't want to speak truth to power. Netflix is perfectly free to do so, at least in the US. If I had to guess as to their reasoning, I would say it's probably because they don't think it would be profitable enough.

> after actually seeing the results of doing so the first time

It may just be me, but I get the impression that most people that voted for again have been pleased with the result of these last 4 years.

That's the problem.

Youtube was great for this...

Indeed, the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi is distinctly horrific, the mass starvation and other horrors in Yemen merit mention too and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself is home to many abuses of its immigrant workforce.

Still, one has to note that attention to the horrific abuse of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is also related to him being in an extremely powerful Saudi family (he was the nephew of Adnan Khashoggi, once the world's large arms dealer, just for one data point). Notably a family also with strong ties to Turkey (where he was murdered). Khashoggi's murder was a logic part of the campaign of the current effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, to establish himself as absolute ruler of the kingdom, a campaign that also included kidnapping the various billionaire princes who'd looted the Saudi treasury and literally torturing their billions out of them (given the billionaires had no doubt engaged in similar to violence to whatever underlings, one might be tempted to enjoy such violence but one should avoid such temptation).

And indeed, some might look to MBS as being in the tradition of earlier "enlightened despots" as he also pushes some degree of modernizing measures. I'd tend to just point out the fundamental rottenness of the Saudi regime as well as the general power structure of the entire area.

Why do people always assume that any narrative that opposes mainstream one is automatically "the truth"?

Because people have been trained to believe the mainstream produces nothing but lies and propaganda, and that the truth can only be found elsewhere, and because modern social-media driven culture doesn't allow for the nuance necessary for proper critical thought and honest skepticism.

What you said about social media is absolutely true wrt to trying to have nuanced conversations. It is not true when it comes to fact gathering. For example, my own opinion of Khashoggi changed when I read twitter posts from people I follow for completely unrelated reasons but who happen to have known him personally.

What do you mean "changed?" What was your opinion before and then after reading these Twitter posts?

Before - saudis murdered a martyr for journalistic freedom. After - barbaric power struggle spilled out of Saudi Arabia and claimed one of the players as victim

Fair enough. Kashoggi most definitely was not just any journalist. Either interpretation reflects pretty horrible on the Saudi royal family though.

This is a rather bizarre and kind of scary comment to be honest. It suggests that one's opinion about torture and murder depends on the individual being tortured rather than on the one doing the torture.

I really don't care one bit about Khashoggi, one way or another, and no Twitter post about him could ever make me change my mind that torturing and murdering him is categorically wrong.

Yo you might want to take a long hard look at yourself if you're cool with torturing and murdering anyone.

Are you of the opinion that the bulk of mainstream journalism, like what is shown on the 6 o'clock news, contains the nuance and balance necessary for proper critical thought and honest skepticism?

I'm of the opinion that critical thought and honest skepticism should be applied equally to both mainstream and alternative media, because in modern reality both are essentially the same and can be undermined by the same biases, incentives and narrative distortions.

Simply assuming the mainstream media is lying all the time and every conspiracy theory is probably true is lazy cynicism.

You seem to have answered a question other than the one I asked.

Why do you seem to be assuming it isn't? What's more, if you're talking about Israel, Palestine, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, that stuff is all out there in reputable news sources that most people don't even bother to read.

Anyone who deals in absolutes either acts in bad faith or lacks maturity or intellect. That being said, when bad actors like SA don't get called out by our politicians, this kind of narrative is passively incentivized. What's happening in Yemen is a tragedy from a human and from a humanistic pov, and it is very obviously underreported in what we call mainstream media. That doesn't do the topic justice, and in a polarized world, to do the topic justice may well be called "to say the truth". Obviously that doesn't help with the polarized state of things, but there is sound emotion (heh) behind the analogy

> Anyone who deals in absolutes either acts in bad faith or lacks maturity or intellect.

Quite an absolute trichotomy.

Don't assume anything is the truth. You have to be skeptical. Now my claim in this instance is that the media doesn't report about the UK's role in Yemen at all. Declassified UK does and they provide evidence. But don't take them or anyone else as gospel.

I am not in the UK. US mainstream media does produce plenty of criticism on US involvement

It makes people feel smart and special.

Nonsense. I was listening to an episode of Radio Four's Moral Maze about the UK's arms sales to Saudi just yesterday.

I found three stories in the Guardian with about two seconds of searching:

- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/27/uk-faces-ne...

- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/07/britain-to-res...

- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/21/uk-accused-of-...

It's no great secret that the British government are backing the Saudis against Iranian-funded fighters in Yemen.

> tell the truth about Palestine

I don't know why, but my dogwhistlemetre for antisemitism is spinning out of control.

One can be opposed to the Israeli government without being antisemitic.

Yes indeed. One can criticize a government without talking bad about a race, ethnicity, or religion.

Not a comment on this one in particular, but I tend to stay away from documentaries. I have a friend who is a documentary editor and he can take the same footage and tell completely opposite stories with it, cutting here, leaving out something there. He’s told me that it almost doesn’t matter what you give him, he can make it look however you want.

I think people trust video more than anything but it’s important to be skeptical of the reality TV-esqe trope techniques that appear in lots of popular documentaries. They are storytelling like anything else.

By that logic you shouldn't engage in conversation or consume any media whatsoever.

No, by that logic you should just be careful about what you consume, avoiding people trying to tell a story.

How would you even literally describe events on the news without telling a story?

Buddhist monks were traditionally encouraged to begin all teachings with a Pali language equivalent of Thus I have heard... https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.183.th...

AP and Reuters routinely do that.

Really? You think these aren't "stories"?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-migran...

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-politi...

No cherry picking whatsoever here. These are just the first links on the respective news services' "top news" pages.

“Routinely” does not mean “always”, especially as their own consumer facing news feeds are not the same as their news syndication.

You can redefine "routinely" to mean just about anything. I "routinely" get my car's oil changed about once every 6 months. All I did was go straight to their site and pick out literally the first link in a list, and 2/2 were most definitely stories.

“Yesterday, Airbnb went public at a price of $X. It has revenue of $Y. It was founded in year Z...”

Versus

“In 2008, the genius Brian Chesky woke up on a frigid San Francisco morning with a crick in his neck and looked out on the fog. He had just had a terrible experience with an evil multinational hotel chain...”

(Just a hyperbolic example, not meant to be all encompassing)

It’s less of a measurable outcome and more of a goal and methodology.

None of that is news. That's an almanac entry.

Conversations are different from documentaries in that they require two or more people, whereas documentaries is someone talking at you.

As for media, there are different mediums of media that allow for more trickery. For example, if a documentary says so-and-so did X, it would take some while after viewing the documentary to check if so-and-so really did X. You are putting faith with the people creating the documentary to tell you the truth. Whereas, good non-fiction books lay claims with sources to back the claims, so you can immediately go to the source to see if the claim is really true.

Also, video can be a very emotionally salient medium, thus may impede your more rational modes of thinking.

Note: I am not against documentaries, nor is this a take on the Khashoggi documentary.

this was the argument that Socrates, according to Plato, said that the egyptian god Thoth made against doing writing!

Interesting is that in the Phaedrus?

This isnt even true. A conversation is just two people presenting their own versions of an idea to you (like documentaries). Sure the conversation can morph the ideas you take away, but in the end if you're worried about the packaging of an idea or information literally any conversation with an "other" is subject to rhetoric like any other medium.

Sure, conversation is subject to rhetoric, but what I am saying is that you are able (insofar as you are capable) of trying to unravel the rhetoric, as the conversation involves you and another person. Thus, you have more power in conversation. Whereas, documentaries is more passive. But if you are referring to conversations that you are viewing as a passive observer, then I totally agree with you.

I can't speak for you but I think about what a documentary is showing me and consider it against what else I know, just like having a conversation with someone.

The less comically baby-with-bathwater response to the realisation that "media is not balanced truth", is to develop critical faculties for media consumption and to cross-check new information with additional evidence such as your own experience before acceptance. This is hardly a new realisation and was already explored in ancient times including by the Buddhist Kalama Sutta[0] (~450BCE) and the Chinese Mohists[1] (~400BCE), etc.

[0] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.th... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-logic-language/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him." - Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu

Or just watch it but don't take everything said at point value and do research afterwards. Generally every documentary has a ton of articles written on "why they were wrong" afterwards so you can get both sides of the story.

You have to start by hearing one side of the story if you want to eventually get to both side of the story :)

Huh. This article goes out of its way to avoid saying which services eventually agreed to distribute this.

Perhaps the New York Times is also self-censoring?

The exact platforms it will be available on might not be finalized, so mentioning them by name might not be wise at this point.

Why not PBS's Frontline?

I don't think frontline buys docs, they produce their own. Probably weren't willing to pay enough, if they were willing to pay anything at all.

> “Sadly, they are not the same company as a few years ago when they passionately stood up to Russia and Putin.”

They're still the same company. The difference is simply that Russia is an "evil enemy" while Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest allies and arms importers of the US, even though it's doing far more "evil" things if you truly use objective standards of "human rights" or whatnot. Simply how politics works, full of hypocrisy and double standards, as always.

Although I oppose cancel culture, I wish more people pressured Netflix into airing such documentaries.

However, Netflix did produce an excellent docu on Jeffrey Epstein, so perhaps they chose to forego this docu for other reasons than it being controversial in some areas.

What’s being cancelled? If Netflix doesn’t pay to distribute a specific movie it’s “cancelled”? It’s still being released, nobody bought-and-buried it like National Enquirer or something. Also I streamed Kingdom of Silence about Khashoggi off Amazon several months ago

I might have not explained myself well. I meant to say that, I do not wish for Netflix to be "cancelled", or viciously attacked, as is common nowadays. But I do hope to see that users hold Netflix accountable on basic principles.

The Epstein documentary is a prime example of how Netflix and others will pretend to address a topic but instead are subtley whitewashing it. It was not a thorough documentary, for reasons that are obvious to those who know how hollywood and it's periphreals work... but almost no one will address for the same reasons. No one wants their piece of the pie taken away.

If you are wondering what I'm talking about, read up on the PROMIS scandal and who Ghislaines father was.

Attacking Epstein is not really controversial anymore, especially since he's dead and no one is really standing by him anymore. Alienating Saudi Arabia absolutely is, as shown by the controversy around the Patriot Act episode.

Seems like a bit of a leap to accuse these platforms of not bidding because they didn’t want to deal with the political fallout or hurt their business instead of other reasons without any concrete proof of why they decided against bidding for it.

What's the most likely reason, given Occam's Razor? Don't forget the article quotes Reed Hastings saying “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to entertain.” Granted, this is about Hassan Minaj's show, but you can't tell me the CEO of Netflix is going to cancel Patriot Act over such an issue, but then be fully open to showing this film.

Edit: changed to use the exact quote from Reed Hastings.

previous thread that didn't get attention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25535991

Q. How come another thread with the same url doesn't show up with someone posts the same url again?

the links aren't the same, even if they point to the same NYT article

Disappointing.

Im not going to engage with the content of the article or the documentary, because a) of the paywall and b) in 99% of all western coverage the verdict was already in, although many things remain fishy.

Besides the act itself, the most unusual detail of Kashoggi‘s killing was the way he was killed as well as the location.

Turkey is Saudi Arabia’s biggest Threat next to Iran (and its former colonial overlord). Why on earth carry out such a possible PR disaster before the face of your enemy’s intelligence services (and its many eyes)?

Maybe things didn’t go as planned or maybe some people intentionally broke Saudi Protocol, either for grinding an axe with Kashoggi or to harm MBS.

Something underreported is the role of Kashoggi: He is not just some mere dissident Saudi reporter. He was part of the uppermost Saudi classes, next in rank right after the royal family. A fact which explains how someone gets to make a journalism career inside of Saudi Arabia whilst criticizing domestic politics. And how a dissident journalist could be a multi millionaire.

It also explains why Kashoggi was an Islamist and fervent member of the muslim brotherhood. The religious mantle of the brotherhood serves as a tool of power for Saudi‘s upper class to overthrow the only layer above them.

The Brotherhood claims to speak in the name of religious freedom and democracy. They are the ones who demonstrate for free elections, but when they win the first of those elections they immediately proceed to cancel all further elections. Just see Egypt or Hamas. Or go see Turkey, which rulers are, alas, Muslim Brotherhood.

Which is where the link between Kashoggi and its place of death comes full circle: He was best friends with Brotherhood-Brother, President of Turkey, Erdogan.

A mere „dissident“ doesn’t get to be friends with the world’s most prolific „Brother“. And he doesn’t just get murdered coincidentally in this Brother‘s backyard.

This is wild speculation but for me it is much more likely that Kashoggi was the sacrificial offering, to help further the Brotherhood‘s cause since prior to Kashoggi‘s death MBS went on a rampage against Saudi Arabia’s rebellious upper class. A class Bin Laden was part of and a class that if it would win power in Saudi Arabia, would change the Middle East power dynamics entirely.

"Reader mode" gets me past the paywall (Edge, win10)

Wow works on safari mobile too. Thanks for the tip!

NYT's paywall requires JS. Reader mode (or disabling JS on the client), bypasses it. It does break some image loading, as well as their fancier article types.

I wonder how long this post will stay up before it gets flagged.

Why?

This is a venture capital owned forum. Where does vc money flow from today?

There isn’t a rift in our community about Khashoggi’s murder, so it won’t be flagged. Things that get flagged are typically because they start flame wars. You need two or more sides to have a flame war.

Edit: Turns out I'm an idiot. No censorship here!

Original comment:

The same article was posted yesterday or the day before. I commented on it. So I went looking for that comment as counter evidence of your assertion.

I can't find the comment...

seriously? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25536611, right now 7th comment in your recent comment list https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=LatteLazy

Sorry, I'm an idiot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com