Over the past three decades, Middle Eastern and foreign powers have invested heavily in Arabic-speaking transnational news media. Two prominent examples include the Qatari-funded Al-Jazeera and the Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya news channels. How do Qatar and Saudi Arabia use these media outlets to advance their interests? Building on scholarship in public diplomacy and media effects, I argue that these countries have utilized the agenda-setting and framing roles of transnational media to influence Arab publics by shaping ideas and discourse in the Middle East. Qatar has used Al-Jazeera to mobilize Arab masses by focusing on topics that may anger Arabs, such as discussions of victims of foreign intervention and domestic repression. Saudi Arabia has used Al-Arabiya to pacify Arab publics by paying more attention to apolitical news. Using topic modeling and dictionary methods on hundreds of thousands of articles from Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera, I examine how the two media sources covered these different themes and how they framed three prominent episodes in the region: the Arab-Israeli conflict, the 2013 coup in Egypt, and the 2017 diplomatic crisis between Qatar and its neighbors. This study contributes to the literature on public diplomacy. While much of the research on public diplomacy has focused on great powers or Western democracies, this paper shows that even smaller autocracies use media to influence foreign masses. Additionally, this study contributes to the international relations in the Middle East literature, as regional tensions have increased in recent years partly because of the way state-funded media cover foreign competitors.