Until June 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world that prohibited women from driving, a restriction deeply embedded in religious interpretations and socio-cultural norms and widely debated in national and international media. This study examines how Al-Jazirah, a leading Saudi Modern Standard Arabic online news outlet, discursively represented Saudi women and the driving ban before and after its revocation, with particular focus on the strategic use of modality. Adopting a mixed-methods design, the research integrates Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Two sub-corpora were compiled: CD01 (2010–2014), representing the restriction period, and CD02 (2018), representing the post-ban period. Using AntConc (Version 4.3.1, 2024), modal expressions were identified and quantified through wordlist and concordance analyses, followed by qualitative interpretation grounded in Fairclough’s Textually Oriented CDA and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach. The findings reveal a significant shift in modal distribution and function across the two periods. During the restriction era, deontic and epistemic modalities were predominantly employed to legitimise and reinforce the prohibition, often framed through religious authority, social order, and women’s protection. In contrast, the post-restriction discourse foregrounds high-certainty epistemic modality and enabling deontic constructions to normalise women’s driving as lawful, necessary, and beneficial for national development and social progress. Modal expressions of obligation, permission, and certainty are strategically recontextualised to align with state policy and institutional endorsement. The study demonstrates that modality functions as a central linguistic mechanism through which media discourse reconstructs ideological positioning in response to shifting political and legal contexts in Saudi Arabia.