( Hatem Ali / AP Photo )
Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo, columnist for The Guardian and former MSNBC host, talks about leaving MSNBC and starting his new network, plus the war in Gaza and long-term solutions and the U.S. presidential primary campaigns.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As an MSNBC host, Mehdi Hasan was last here in March of last year for his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. Now he'll have to argue, debate, and persuade somewhere other than the Cable Network. They recently canceled his Sunday night show as part of a major restructuring of their weekend line-up for the presidential election season and looking for higher ratings, and faced backlash because Mehdi is one of the few Muslim hosts anywhere on TV news and he had a fan base who felt especially served by his Win Every Argument style.
Now Mehdi Hasan has launched his own media company called Zeteo. It's just a few weeks old. He joins us to talk about it and a few wishes in the news. Mehdi, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.
Mehdi Hasan: Thanks for having me, Brian. Just to clarify a couple of quick things, it's Zeteo, which is an ancient Greek word that means to seek out, to inquire, to look for the truth. That's the name of the new media company. As for the higher ratings that you mentioned a moment ago, my show was one of the highest rated shows on MSNBC on the weekends.
Brian Lehrer: Why do you think you were canceled?
Mehdi Hasan: You'd have to ask MSNBC.
Brian Lehrer: I know there are sometimes contractual departure agreements, so I don't know if you're at liberty to say. From what I've read, they canceled your shows on the network and on the Peacock streaming platform, but were offering to keep you on as a contributor doing analysis and filling in for other hosts. You had previously filled in for Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes I see. From what I read, you were coming in second or third to CNN and Fox, but you decided to leave instead of continue in a different role. Tell us in your own words to the extent that you're able, what happened there as you see it.
Mehdi Hasan: Just on the ratings, we were actually beating CNN on Sunday evenings. I was one of the highest rated shows on the weekend evening line-up and Fox wins the weekends. Weekend evenings, Brian, they're a bit of a graveyard slot for Cable News, I think everyone accepts that. It's all relative when we talk about winning and doing well in the ratings. In terms of being a guest host, yes, MSNBC said you can stay on and you can guest host in prime time Monday to Friday. I enjoyed sitting in for Chris Hayes, and for Rachel, and for Alex, and for Lawrence on the prime time schedule. I enjoyed being an on-air analyst, which they also offered me.
Brian, it's 2024. You know better than me this is a huge year for news, for politics. It's a huge election year. We have a war in the Middle East and an impending famine that we're told is the worst famine since World War 2 according to today's Guardian. There is a lot of bad news and big news around. I felt that someone like myself, who has a lot of opinions, a lot things to say, I couldn't really just be a guest host or occasional on-air analyst. I needed to find a platform where I could really speak freely and speak regularly. I asked to leave MSNBC, and they very graciously agreed to let me exit and do my own thing.
Brian Lehrer: Tell us more about Zeteo. See there, I thought I had my Greek pronunciations down, but apparently not. Zeteo, tell us.
Mehdi Hasan: Brian, neither of us were able to wander around with Socrates and Plato when they were saying good stuff. The aim of Zeteo, and it's a digital media company that we've only soft launched a few weeks ago, but we've had a lot of success and a huge amount of support in the few weeks since we've launched. I think we're already almost up to 150,000 subscribers without really even formally launching, which shows there's a real demand for an alternative to what's out there. We have a full launch coming in mid-April, shows, podcasts, video essays, articles, newsletters.
We have a bunch of high-profile contributors somewhere between, I'm just still negotiating with some of them, between 8 and 12 folks, who a lot of your listeners will know, respect, like, admire, be impressed by. We're trying to provide an independent alternative to what we hear and see on our television screens, in our newspapers at a time when people across the political spectrum, but especially on the liberal left, liberals who are upset with the normalizing of Trump by some elements of our mainstream media and people on the left who are upset with our inability to call out a genocide in Gaza. People are upset with a lot of the mainstream coverage. I think there's a gap in the market that Zeteo plans to fill.
Brian Lehrer: Traditionally, one of the obstacles to left-leaning commercial media success and I believe that you're starting a business here not a non-profit, right?
Mehdi Hasan: It is indeed. It is a for-profit subscription-based business. I'll do the plug right now. Get out of the way, Z-E-T-E-O.com, zeteo.com if you want to subscribe.
Brian Lehrer: One of the obstacles has been that many businesses with advertising dollars to spend don't want to be associated with views they see as risky for their image. You just said genocide, some people will debate that word, some people just don't want to be associated with that word or that might emphasize stories that are bad for profits content-wise. How much of an obstacle do you see that as being for you?
Mehdi Hasan: Just a couple of things. You're a 100% right. People don't want to be associated with that word or think it's controversial, but only in the context of Gaza. We're fine to talk about Ukraine genocide or a Uyghur genocide. For some reason, it's only Gaza where we run from the G-word. In terms of the advertisers issues, yes, it's one of the reasons why I decided to go down this route of a subscriber-based business model because I don't want to be at the whims of advertisers, or YouTube bosses, or Facebook bosses who are shadow-banning folks or advertisers who are deciding to move their dollars based on lobbied pressures or whatever it is, fears of controversy.
Number one, look around and look what's happening to media businesses that have done the traditional eyeballs, clicks, ads. They're getting destroyed by Google and Facebook who have monopolized the advertising market. There is a lot of shadow-banning and politicizing going on. Look at Elon Musk. Not a man I sympathize with, not a man whose views I like, but it's interesting to see that even the richest man in the world, the owner of one of the most influential messaging platforms on Earth, even he has his issues with advertising. Now, I happen to think they're right to pull their ads off far-right content, but that's a separate argument.
My point being is even Musk has to take into account what's going on with the advertising industry. That's why I prefer the subscriber model. You're right, people on the left haven't really done this. On the right, you have the Ben Shapiros, the Barry Weisses, even Tucker Carlson now doing subscription models direct to consumers, allowing their brand names to carry their audiences to new media spaces. People in the progressive base really haven't tried. What I'm doing is some might say bold, others might say crazy.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, any fans of Mehdi Hasan's MSNBC show or his other work, actually, are you still a Guardian columnist too?
Mehdi Hasan: I am. I just started a monthly column for The Guardian.
Brian Lehrer: How about that? Listeners, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have time for just a few calls or if you're not a fan and you want to debate him, he says he's a fan of debating.
Mehdi Hasan: Bring it.
Brian Lehrer: 212-433-WYNC or just with a question, Mehdi Hasan's new media organization called Zeteo. 212-433-9692, call or text. I see on the Zeteo home page that you write a lot, including a featured weekly column called Mehdi's Monday Memo. Your memo this week is called Trump, a "Bloodbath" and the "Banality of Crazy." For listeners who don't know, Trump was speaking to a group of auto workers in Michigan and he said, and I don't want to play the clip of him, but I will quote it, "We're going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line if I get elected, meaning a tariff on imports to favor American-made cars."
Then he said, "If I don't get elected, it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole. That's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. That'll be the least of it." The Biden Campaign says Trump was once again threatening violence. The Trump Campaign says, "No, he was just talking about the economy. It was about tariffs and jobs." How did you hear it that led you to write a piece about it?
Mehdi Hasan: I heard it like I hear all Trump speeches and rallies. Unfortunately, Brian, for my sins, I listen to a lot of Trump speeches and rallies. I don't reset every time the man starts speaking again. When Trump defenders say we need context, yes, let's do context. This is a man who spent the last 10 years inciting violence. He's inspired mass shooters, he's encouraged people at his rallies to attack other people at rallies, he incited an armed insurrection about Capitol. By the way, in this very speech before he gets to his auto industry part, how did he begin it by?
He began by saluting domestic terrorists, insurrectionists in prison for their own [unintelligible 00:08:58]. He said people he called hostages and plans to pardon and free violent people who attacked police officers. The context is that this is a very violent man who recently has been quoting Hitler. This is a man who's talked about immigrants poisoning the blood of our country, referring to his left wing opponents as vermin.
This is a man who says he wants to terminate the Constitution, as I say, wants to pardon violent criminals and release them onto our streets. When he threatens a bloodbath and still doesn't accept the results of the last election or the next election, there is only one way to hear that. Don't tell me this nonsense that it's about tariffs as the Trump people are claiming. Some of us were not born yesterday.
Brian Lehrer: You've obviously got strong opinions about Gaza. I see you have several pieces on the side already. I'm curious how you would gauge the impact or potential impact of President Biden's increasingly direct criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and what you thought of Chuck Schumer Senate floor speech last week?
Mehdi Hasan: In some ways, what Chuck Schumer did was historic and pretty unprecedented and dramatic. This is the most senior Jewish member of the United States government, the majority leader, a man who has long been a supporter of Israel, a very, very strong supporter of Israel to the point that he did not support Barack Obama, his own Democratic president's Iran deal because he was worried about Israeli security and Israeli arguments against the Iran. For Schumer to come out like that was dramatic. Biden supposedly not getting along with Bibi Netanyahu, we keep being told is supposed to mean something. Look, on the one hand, as I say, it's a big deal because it clearly shows that some Democrats realize their base are not happy with Netanyahu and they realized Netanyahu has gotten way, way, way, way too far now.
We're talking about more than 30,000 dead, we're talking about an impending famine, maybe a feminine that's already underway. We're talking about, according to UNICEF in The New Yorker today, more than 1,000 kids having limbs amputated in Gaza. Think about the horror of that, Brian. In the one sense, it is a marker. In another sense, it's a bit of a distraction because let us be very honest, A, Netanyahu is not the problem here. If you've got rid of Netanyahu tomorrow, that wouldn't change the occupation, that wouldn't change the Israeli military response in Gaza, that wouldn't change the far-right fascists who make up the Netanyahu government.
He's a bit of a distraction. B, I don't buy this idea that we are distancing ourselves from the Netanyahu administration. The Biden White House keeps leaking this, Brian, that, "Oh, we have very stern words," or, "Joe Biden swears about Netanyahu in private." The reality is when push comes to shove, we give him all the weapons he wants, we give him all the aid he wants, and Joe Biden says again and again, "We're not going to condition the aid."
Every time there's a vote at the UN, we protect the Netanyahu administration with a veto. Actions speak louder than words. In our actions, we are fully complicit in this genocide of the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu is inflicting on the Palestinian people in Gaza right now.
Brian Lehrer: Here's a fan, I think. Ali on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC with Mehdi Hasan. Hello, Ali.
Ali: Hello, thank you for taking my call. Mehdi, I just want to congratulate you on this new chapter of your career. You have done an outstanding job reporting on the atrocities, humanizing the Palestinians, in particular, and not participating in what many, many news organizations do, which is journalistic malpractice and enabling these atrocities that go completely unchecked. I thank you for your integrity, I thank you for your courage, and I wish you the best of luck in your next chapter. I do though have a question.
Mehdi Hasan: Please, and thank you.
Ali: I was just wondering to see, in terms of where things are headed, do you feel that you're getting the right amount of support for the way your-- Do you see a shift in the way young journalists coming out of school or just the way things are emerging leaning towards your approach that's much more realistic and grounded in facts and moving away from bias? Do you see that happening more broadly in journalism?
Mehdi Hasan: It's a great question. I can only speak for people I've met at public events, people who reach out to me. Young journalists certainly are inspiring in terms of their ability to do the job and also their interest in being a part of this industry, which right now is going through so much pain, and trauma, and layoffs, and mass redundancies. I feel bad for young people coming up through the industry right now because there are so few viable financial options for them. Look, is there a mind shift in terms of being able to call out things? One of the reasons I set up Zeteo is because I want to be able to show young journalists and the industry in general that there is another way to do things.
We don't have to have this ridiculous, supposedly impartial view from nowhere that ends up just both sides in fascism, or racism, or genocide. We need to be able to speak certain hard and plain truths to the people in power and not pretend that there are two sides to every story. There aren't two sides to holocaust today, there aren't two sides to climate change, there aren't two sides to racism. We don't need to say racism is racially tinged or racially charged, we could say racism. I do think we do have a young generation who are willing to speak more truth to power than maybe some of my generation have been able to in recent years.
Brian Lehrer: Alan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Mehdi Hasan. Hi, Alan.
Alan: Oh, good morning. At the risk of sounding as paranoid as Trump does sometimes, you think it's reasonable speculation that October 7th was not just something initiated in Gaza, but maybe a result from an access connecting Trump to Putin, a desire to distract from Ukraine war, that Putin has links to Iran which were helping supply his Ukraine War and Iran links to Hamas. In other words, this may also have been a desire by Trump through his friends to help divide the Muslims and Jews in the Democratic coalition and weaken Democrats going into next year.
Brian Lehrer: Wow, that's not where I thought you were going to go. I haven't heard that one before. Mehdi, have you?
Mehdi Hasan: Alan, you prefaced your remarks at the risk of sounding paranoid. Forgive me my friend, you do sound a little paranoid. I am a great critic of Trump as people know, but I would not ascribe to him or the people around him the ability or the brainpower to pull off that kind of, for whatever better word, conspiracy between various malign actors. I think there is a simpler explanation to the tragedy and the barbarism of October the 7th, which is that you cannot indefinitely contain a group of people under military occupation for decades and expect that there won't be violent.
There is violence in the Middle East and the root cause of that violence is an illegal military occupation that is now in what, its 57th year in the occupied West Bank in Gaza. This is not just me saying this, people like General Shlomo Brom, one of Israel's most famous military strategists, says, "The oppressed will rise against the oppressor because it's absurd to hope that Israel could indefinitely contain with its military might millions of Palestinians who claim the right to a free normal life." That is the statement of Shlomo Brom. For me, that is what happened on October the 7th, not Putin, nor Iran, or whatever it is, sorry.
Brian Lehrer: Alan, thank you for your call. For you, Mehdi, the author of a book on debate and persuasion, let me play devil's advocate on one or two points you just made, and not to defend Israel on how it's fighting the war, but on the bigger picture that you were laying out. They would say they tried to be done with Gaza about 20 years ago, ended the occupation, and forced Israeli settlers to leave.
They only started the blockade as a matter of defense against arms shipments when Hamas came to power there with its explicit mission to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. Each of the wars in Gaza since have started with a Hamas rocket attack on Israeli civilians, and then October 7th. Hamas could have gotten Israel off Gaza's back long ago, Israel would argue, if Hamas wasn't intent on continuing its permanent war. Do you see some truth in that Israeli take?
Mehdi Hasan: No, I don't, Brian, you'll be shocked to hear. First of all, it's not true that the previous Gaza conflicts were all started by Hamas, somewhere but not all of them. Ceasefires have been broken on both sides, and that's been well documented by multiple neutral observers and international observers. Just on your broader point, Israel was never done with Gaza, this myth that they pulled out all the settlers, and the occupation, and the festival, and the international of Gaza is still occupied. The Israelis control most of the land borders, all of the naval waters, all of the airspace. You tell me a country in the world that would accept that, any country that you would call independent or sovereign.
The Israelis even control the population register in Gaza, Brian, which means if you're born in Gaza, the Israelis are the ones who register you and control all of the information about your birth, life, and death. This idea that Gaza was free, it was not free. The boycott, the siege, it was not defensive. Again, multiple human rights groups, including Israeli human rights groups, like Gisha have said over the years, that the boycott was not defensive, that it was arbitrary, that it was cruel. Items like pasta, coriander, these are items that were banned at certain points going into Gaza.
Even now, David Miliband, the former British Foreign Minister, Head of the International Rescue Committee, he went on CNN this week to point out that dual-use items have been blocked going into Gaza. Entire aid trucks, Brian, are being turned away because there's a scissors in them. A pair of scissors is inside a truck for medical purposes, the entire truck is turned away. For years now, the people in Gaza have been blockaded, besieged. The UN said it would be unlivable years ago. We're now in 2024, it's certainly unlivable now.
No, A, I don't believe the Israeli narrative. One last thing, Brian, let's say everything you said was true, let's say everything you said, which it wasn't, and I know those aren't your words, you were given the Israeli side, that still does not justify the collective punishment of 2.2 million people, half of whom are children, and who are now in the midst of one of the worst famines and living memory according to the experts.
Brian Lehrer: On the role of Zeteo, your new site, in the information universe about the war, you tend to focus on criticism of Israeli. Your pieces so far are about a radical Israeli rabbi who calls for killing Palestinian babies because they're going to grow up to be fighters, that's such an extreme person, another one called Seven Israeli Myths About UNRWA, debunked UNWRA, the UN Palestinian relief agency, another one Top Seven Lies About Gaza, so that's clearly where you're coming from. Do you give Hamas a pass on the other side of this on their role in the civilian catastrophe by embedding its battalions among civilians, and apartment buildings, and hospitals, and such?
Mehdi Hasan: Brian, it's a little bit weird that you spent so much time looking at my site and reading my stuff, but you don't seem to be aware that I've been very, very, very critical of Hamas. I've been critical of Hamas for decades. I've been critical of Hamas since October the 7th, I was critical of Hamas on October the 7th. No, I'm not sparing in my criticism of Hamas, but the missing context here, of course, is that we don't fund Hamas. I'm not responsible for Hamas. I am responsible for the famine in Gaza. I am responsible for the killing of 30,000 people in Gaza because my taxes paid for it. The United States government is funding one side of this conflict. United States does not fund Hamas last time I checked. This idea that we either fund them or protect them on the UN veto or arm Hamas, I don't think we send arms to Hamas. We do to Israel. Therefore, that is the focus of my journalism. By the way, yes, the focus of my journalist right now is on criticism of Israel because the rest of the US media is completely failed on this issue, has dropped the ball.
I could go through your website, I can go through The New York Times, The Washington Post, and show the exact opposite pieces that are providing cover and safety for the Israeli narrative, including in absurd headlines where we go out of our way to use the passive voice and never cite that Israel is responsible for bombing a hospital or Israel is responsible for bombing a refugee camp. I'm trying to do a little bit of correction on my end with this new media organization.
Look, Hamas is a brutal group. What it did on October the 7th was pure terror. They killed innocents, they abducted innocent babies as hostages into the war crime, but none of that justifies what Israel is doing right now and nor are we responsible for what Hamas is doing. We are your listeners in New York and across the country sadly, are responsible to the crimes that Israel's carrying out. That's the point I'm trying to make.
Brian Lehrer: Last question then. Have you envisioned what might come next as a longer-term solution? One can argue history and whether Israel as a Jewish state was right to create on mixed population land, but here we are with, if I have my numbers right, about 9 million Israeli, 7 million Palestinians between Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas and Netanyahu have their competing visions of one-state solutions, each seen as ruinous to their safety, and human rights, and historical needs by the other population, but getting to a two-state solution remains hard. Can you have vision a longer-term way out?
Mehdi Hasan: I think right now is not the time for solution, sadly. The humanitarian crisis is so tragic, I don't think there's any solution on the horizon. I think it's only going to get worse before it even ever gets better. What I would say is I support equal rights for everyone living there. You mentioned the numbers. Millions of people living side-by-side and they have to live side-by-side as equals. They cannot live side-by-side with one side as an occupier and one sided occupied, one side privileged, one side not privileged.
I would like to see everyone with equal right. Look, I'm not Palestinian, I am not Israeli. They will have to decide what the future is for that part of the world. What can say is I, as an American tax fan and American journalist, think that we should be supporting human rights, equality, and the rule of law in that part of the world and that's not being followed right now.
Brian Lehrer: Why don't just tell people how they can find your new site.
Mehdi Hasan: Oh, I'd love to, Brian. Thank you so much. It's zeteo.com, Z-E-T-E-O.com/subscribe. If you'd like to support us either as a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, the content you mentioned, Brian, is all preliminary soft launch stuff, the real stuff's coming in a few weeks. I think people will enjoy the shows and the contributors.
Brian Lehrer: Mehdi Hasan, thank you very much.
Mehdi Hasan: Thanks Brian.
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