Donald Trump’s dismissive response on Tuesday to a question about the Saudi crown prince’s role in the murder of a journalist was shocking. But it’s part of a broader global trend.
‘Things happen’
Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office with Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday was a triumph for the Saudi crown prince, who was still a pariah in Washington only a few years ago. His biggest coup was Trump’s confirmation that Saudi Arabia will be able to buy the most advanced F35 stealth aircraft despite the United States’s commitment to maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region.
Binyamin Netanyahu’s government wanted Riyadh to receive a less advanced version of the aircraft, or at least for the sale to be made conditional on the Saudis normalising relations with Israel. But the crown prince said that although Saudi Arabia wants to be part of the Abraham Accords, it will not happen until there is a clearer path towards Palestinian statehood.
The most striking moment came when ABC News reporter Mary Bruce asked MBS, as he is known, about the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Trump interrupted, chiding the journalist for embarrassing his guest by asking such a question.
“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” he said. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”
What happened to Khashoggi, who had been a critic of MBS, is that he was lured into the consulate to be murdered by a group of assassins sent from Riyadh and his body was dismembered using a bone saw.
An intelligence report published by the Biden administration in 2021 said that the crown prince ordered the killing and that the murderers included members of his personal security detail.
Trump’s dismissal of the killing was too brazen even for MBS, who spoke about how “painful” it was, adding that he had put measures in place to prevent such a thing happening again. But it reflects an increasingly common official attitude to the violent deaths of journalists, particularly those killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza.
At least 248 journalists have died in Gaza since the start of the Israeli offensive that followed Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th 2023, more than in any other conflict in history. Israel has not allowed foreign journalists to enter Gaza since the start of the war and its forces have targeted locally-based reporters, photographers and camera crews, often defaming them by falsely labelling them as terrorists.
Between 2006 and 2025, more than 1,800 journalists have been killed around the world and the numbers are rising. Some 85 per cent of these killings remain judicially unresolved, according to Unesco and many are not properly investigated at all.
The Committee to Protect Journalists last month called for a radical reform of how journalists’ killings are investigated. It singled out Israel for its killing of Palestinian journalists but noted that the impunity enjoyed by the killers was part of a worldwide phenomenon.
“Despite clear evidence of deliberate targeting in many of these cases, no one has been held accountable for their deaths, reflecting a broader and entrenched global pattern, in which the killers of journalists are getting away with murder,” it said.
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