DAMMAM: The National Transformation Plan, which was announced Monday, offers a new platform for the national media that gives journalists the opportunity to exercise the role of “gatekeepers” in society.

The director of the Al Arab news channel Jamal Khashoggi said that journalists are now able to monitor the success and readership of their articles in the media. He added that it is essential for a freedom of information law to be issued to help this process, noting that such laws exist in many countries and give people the right to access important data and information, even when the ministries do not necessarily want to release them.

Khashoggi said that as part of the National Transformation Plan, the ministries have obligated themselves to abide by strict standards of conduct and monitoring.

Minister of State Mohammad Al-Asheikh said in a press conference recently that “the press are also called upon to monitor the state of the media because all the results and information will be published on the network; hence, the officials need to provide the correct information to the press."

He added: "The time is ripe for journalists to question all government authorities and to investigate all of their objectives in the public forum through national media platforms."

He said that officials must cooperate with journalists and the press must exercise its role by remaining strong in the face of potential opposition. He also stressed that the editor of any news platform can write official letters to the government if the responses of the ministries to their questioning are anything less than satisfactory.

He also said that investigative journalism in the Kingdom is weak, emphasizing that reporters must get out of their offices to investigate and meet the relevant officials, as this is the best form of confrontation in order to obtain information by yourself. This, he said, will increase the level of professionalism and seriousness in journalism.

The minister added that the dominant news in the Kingdom is "data news" and relies heavily on social media and other wings of public opinion. However, the news from these kinds of sources is often insignificant and means that officials aren't encouraged to take much notice. He noted that this allows them to not take the press seriously, causing a regression in the quality of the press industry.

Media consultant Hamza Biet Almal said that one of the functions of media organizations are essentially to monitor the performance of public institutions, saying that we must push hard for professionalism and qualified work, and should select information from basic sources, and publish our statistics on performance and daily activities.

He added: "We don’t have investigative journalism in the Kingdom because investigative topics require months to prepare, and the newspapers do not have that time available because they're more concerned with current affairs reporting and opinion surveys.