Well, I've never been to Saudi and only personally know a handful of people who've been there so you speak from a much more experienced perspective than I do. However, some of there previous articles included commentary from William Buckley and articles addressing their need to reform. Maybe, as you said, it's all propaganda and pure hypocrisy.
No, you are right, they run wire stories and various columnists but very carefully selected.
I don't know if they still do it, but if you got a foreign newspaper or magazine, there would be pages missing or they would manually black out women's exposed legs in photos. Articles critical of the Magic Kingdom never made it into print.
One local cartoonist got into serious trouble because he drew a map of Saudi Arabia with a cow straddling it: The head was munching the oil rich Eastern Provinces (heavily Shiite) the utters were flowing to the center (Riyadh) and the business ended up on the Hijaz where Jeddah was.