To the extent that Saudi Arabia cares about foreign opinion, there is a bit of a perverse incentive here. The status quo is shitty, but it’s not News, so no one hears about it, or at least not all on the same day. If you make improvements, that’s news, but the story is naturally not the tiny improvement, it’s the mountain of progress yet to be made. So the best way to avoid criticism is to not change anything.
This is a known structural flaw of “news”, and the traditional antidote is to stage protests and suchlike, which are a way to put ongoing problems into the news cycle without deterring the government from making positive change. The lesson for the Saudi government should be, if you want good press, allow open dissent.
