Weam Al Dakheel entered the history books when she appeared alongside anchor Omar Al Nashwan to become the first female in the history of state-owned Saudi TV Channel 1 to present the nightly 9:30 newscast. Traditionally, men have dominated hard newscasts in Saudi Arabia, while female presenters focused more on soft morning newscasts, women's programmes, cooking shows and weather updates.
"Jumanah Al Shami was the first women to present morning newscasts in 2016. Today history repeats itself as #WeamAlDakheel becomes the presenter of the main nightly newscast, setting a precedent in an historic first for Saudi TV 1," Saudi TV said on its official Twitter channel.
The empowerment of Saudi women is a key pillar of Saudi Vision 2030, spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and a series of reforms initiated in the Kingdom were aimed at the empowerment of women. Notable among these moves was a Royal Decree issued in September 2017 by King Salman bin Abdulaziz allowing women to drive as of June 24, 2018. Vision 2030 also aims to increase the percentage of women in the workforce. The past year saw the entrance of some 600,000 Saudi women to the workforce, and women are now allowed into sports stadiums and allowed to attend concerts and other public gatherings.
Joining her colleague Omar Al-Nashwan in presenting the news on Thursday night, the camera-ready and photogenic Al Dakheel delivered a professional and confident newscast that covered local, regional and international news, drawing kudos from many quarters, locally and regionally, and igniting a torrent of praise and encouragement across social media.
Al Dakheel - a presenter with broadcast media industry experience -- is an operations manager at state-owned Saudi TV and has previously worked as a television reporter for Dubai-based CNBC Arabia and as a news presenter at Bahrain-based Al Arab TV. She received a B.A. in journalism from Beirut's Lebanese American University in 2011 and is trilingual in Arabic, English and French.
The first newscast by Al Dakheel came three days ahead of Saudi's 88th National Day, which will be celebrated this Sunday.
Al Dakheel follows in the footsteps of trailblazers such as Huda Al-Rasheed, who was the first female Saudi broadcaster to present the Saudi TV news bulletin in 1974 before she joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
She spent more than 30 years there, the first Saudi anchorwoman and first female Arab voice on the BBC.
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