MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan Signs Off
One of the few Muslim voices in mainstream news has been silenced. For now.
I accidentally hit send on my newsletter from yesterday a bit early (it was supposed to go out today), so in case you missed that in your inbox, check it out:
This is How The New York Times Does Activism
On December 13th, The New York Times published a story headlined, “So Far, No Major Fallout for M.I.T. President After Contentious Testimony.” As the title suggests, the article was about how M.I.T. President Sally Kornbluth had avoided the hot water that the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found themselves in followi…
But, since I don’t want to leave you all hanging without a Monday update, I’ve written a short bonus post for today, which you’ll find below.
Real quick: here’s the part of the newsletter where I ask you to consider signing up for the free version if you’re new here and ask existing free subscribers to consider upgrading to the paid version.
With that out of the way…
Last April, I wrote about one of my absolute favorite interviewers in media: Mehdi Hasan. The piece was a contrast between his pointed interview with commentator Matt Taibbi and an interview CBS journalist Lesley Stahl conducted with Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA). The point was that Hasan’s performance was superior in just about every way and that Stahl and other journalists should take some pointers.
He even once had me on his show in one of the more lighthearted segments to discuss right-wing outrage at comic books.
Hasan is a pro’s pro, and I’ve been singing his praises and urging journalists to borrow from his style since 2018. I was excited to see him land his own show on MSNBC (even if the network buried it on Sunday evenings), and I hoped that we’d one day see him either take over one of the weeknight primetime slots or see him get a mega-promotion and end up as Chuck Todd’s replacement at Meet the Press.
Well, it’s safe to say that none of that is going to happen now. NBC tapped Kristen Welker to take the reins at MTP, and last night, weeks after the cancelation of The Mehdi Hasan Show, he announced that he would be leaving MSNBC entirely, a departure from a plan to keep him on as an analyst during the election season.
Here’s the part of the newsletter where I’d normally embed a YouTube video of Hasan’s announcement that he was leaving MSNBC entirely, but it seems that the news organization stopped updating the TMHS YouTube playlist weeks ago, so I’ll instead have to rip the video from a link he posted to Twitter and hope MSNBC doesn’t mind:
I don’t think MSNBC appreciates what they’re losing in Hasan.
One of the reasons I appreciate Hasan’s work so much is that there’s a real willingness to admit when he’s gotten something wrong. In 2019, a series of controversial past statements were unearthed in which Hasan (who is Muslim) disparaged non-Muslims and LGBTQ people. I remember feeling hurt by this at the time, as I had really become a fan of his work, but I appreciated the fact that he grew from that, addressed it, and moved on. So I moved on, too.
Another thing I appreciate is how he’ll grill people on all sides of the aisle (go check out this 2015 interview he did with Obama administration Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes on whether Obama had failed Syria).
As the war in Gaza raged on, I watched as a number of right-wing outlets (the ones that claim to be against “cancel culture,” interestingly enough) dug up those old offensive statements, sharing them on social media in an effort to get MSNBC to fire him. Statements that, again, he had apologized for nearly five years earlier. (So much for being against “cancel culture,” right?)
Others didn’t like that his coverage was critical of Israel’s heavy-handed response to Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack1. And others, still, didn’t like that he had the gall to press an Israeli official on a string of lies the government had spread.
The knives were out for Mehdi Hasan, and he truly was on borrowed time at MSNBC.
Hopefully he lands somewhere his skills as a host and interviewer are valued, as MSNBC’s effort to give him the Phil Donahue treatment at the outset of the war shouldn’t be the last we hear from him.
That’s it for me today. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Parker.
Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt ridiculously accused Hasan and other Muslim hosts on the network of working for “Hamas” in an absolutely bigoted rant on Morning Joe. MSNBC would temporarily pull these three Muslim hosts from the air.
MSNBC is so disappointing! They are quick to be done with Mehdi Hassan, a journalist with excellent interviewing skills who asked challenging questions.
And they are fine with mediocre journalism from Andrea Mitchell. Chuck Todd’s interviews were pathetic for years before they let him go, only to replace him with Kristen Welker.
Sad.
Wow. He reduced that Israeli guy to a babbling idiot.