Dubai-based television company makes cuts to John Oliver ‘Last Week Tonight’ episode

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Several portions of the Middle Eastern broadcast of “Last Week Tonight” were cut, after host John Oliver mentioned various controversies surrounding the Saudi government. 

Key Players

John Oliver hosts “Last Week Tonight,” an American late-night satire show on the Home Box Office (HBO) television network. Prior to “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver won three Primetime Emmy awards for his work as a writer on “The Daily Show” between 2006 and 2013.

Orbit Showtime Network (OSN), a satellite television company based in Dubai that largely broadcasts in the Middle East and North Africa, airs both mainstream programming and regional content. The company only has two shareholders: KIPCO, an investment firm linked to the Kuwait ruling family, and Mawarid Group Ltd., a private Saudi investment firm.

Further Details

On Oct. 22, 2023, Oliver hosted an episode on McKinsey and Co., a global management consulting firm based in New York City. Parts of the episode were censored by OSN, which cuts various mentions of McKinsey in the context of Saudi politics.

Journalist Jon Gambrell, who reported the majority of details surrounding the censorship of Oliver’s segment, described a segment in the show as a “satirical, fake McKinsey promotional created by the show.” Oliver largely focused on McKinsey’s relationship with Middle Eastern governments, as a result of the global scope of the consulting firm. McKinsey has maintained ties with the Middle East, boasting over 1,000 consultants at its offices in the region, as well as 10,000 projects completed since the year 2000. 

McKinsey’s website also contains a page dedicated to its work in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The firm claims to recruit “some of the most talented people” in the country, with the goal of generating “a more competitive private sector and modern public sector.” McKinsey conducted nearly 600 projects with Saudi Arabia from 2011 to 2016 alone. 

Referring to the Saudi government’s alleged role in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a former journalist and opinion columnist for The Washington Post who continually criticized Saudi Arabia for a history of egregious Free Speech violations, Oliver claimed that “McKinsey now has offices all over the world, and from them they’ve cozied up to some truly terrible clients.”

In October 2018, Khashoggi traveled to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents that would permit him to marry his fiancée. However, it became clear that Khashoggi never exited the consulate; U.S. intelligence, among others, concluded that he had been assassinated and dismembered under the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This conclusion was denied by the Saudi government, which initially claimed that Khashoggi had never entered the consulate and later insisted that his death was the result of a “fistfight.”

Despite the controversy surrounding Khashoggi’s murder, McKinsey continued to uphold relations with Saudi Arabia, attending a Saudi investment conference in Riyadh that same October. Oliver deemed the conference a “journalist-chopping business jamboree,” referring to the Saudi government as one of several “rootin’-est, tootin’-est, journalist-shootin’-est regimes in the Middle East.”

OSN removed mentions in the episode of the austerity measures that the Saudi government implemented in 2015, when McKinsey allegedly identified three major dissenters — writer Khalid al-Alkami, Canadian Omar Abdulaziz, and an anonymous user by the name of Ahmad — on Twitter and reported them to the Saudi government. Alkami was arrested, while Abdulaziz’s phone was hacked and his brothers were arrested. Ahmad’s account was closed down.

“We were never commissioned by any authority in Saudi Arabia to prepare a report of any kind or in any form to identify critics. In our work with governments, McKinsey has not and never would engage in any work that seeks to target individuals based on their views,” a McKinsey spokesperson claimed after news of the report circulated around the time of Khashoggi’s death. 

The decision by OSN to censor “Last Week Tonight” came after the United Arab Emirates, where OSN is located, declared that it would allow protests at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in late November. 

Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for Arab World Now, an organization that Khashoggi himself founded, expressed concern for the lack of backlash against the continued censorship on behalf of the Saudi government surrounding Khashoggi’s death. “I’m more concerned with the content providers like HBO that are allowing their content to be censored,” Whitson stated.

Outcome 

OSN releases statement to The Associated Press

While OSN refused to answer specific questions from The Associated Press about the reasoning behind specific instances of censorship of the episode, it released a statement shortly after the incident justifying the cuts as a whole.

“As with all aspects of our business, OSN complies with the laws of the markets in which we operate, including all content-related compliance across the region,” OSN claimed. “As such, from time to time we make minor content edits.”