By Christine Rosen
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
Since 2020, Mehdi Hasan has received praise for being one
of television’s most prominent Muslim journalists. He enjoyed a comfortable
perch at MSNBC, where he hosted an eponymous weekend show that was catnip to
people on the very online left. In early 2023, he published a book, Win
Every Argument, that traded on his pugnacious on-air style to offer readers
helpful nuggets of advice such as “The key benefit of knowing your audience is
that it grants you the ability to modify the language you use to make your
case.”
It turns out there was one argument he couldn’t win, and
an audience he clearly did not get to know quite well enough: his MSNBC
viewers, who consistently registered their lack of interest in his show with
abysmal ratings. As the Washington Post reported, Hasan’s show
“regularly came in third place among the 25-to-54 demographic most valued by
advertisers and averaged just 532,000 total viewers in October.”
Those ratings got even worse after the horrific October 7
attack on Israel by Hamas. As the New York Post reported,
total viewers for MSNBC declined “24% for the four days between Oct. 7 and 10,
compared to the same period the previous week,” while viewership rose steeply
for FOX News and somewhat for CNN during the same period. This is perhaps
because MSNBC hosts like Hasan refused to refer to Hamas killers as terrorists,
preferring to call them “fighters” instead. They uncritically reported the Gaza
Health Ministry’s false, inflated death tolls for Palestinians. And, in Hasan’s
case, they frequently blamed Israel and its policies for the horrific attack on
Israeli civilians—even going so far as to compare Israel’s response to Hamas to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These are all extremist views not shared by the
vast majority of Americans.
According to Nielsen, by early November, Hasan’s show had
only 37,000 viewers in the 25–54 demographic, and only 411,000 total. At the
end of the month, MSNBC announced that it was canceling the show, citing a
redesign of its weekend lineup; Hasan would continue at the network as an
on-air analyst and occasional guest host of other shows.
Such cancellations happen all the time; cable news is a
graveyard of badly performing shows whose hosts failed to right the ratings
ship (even Laura Ingraham had a short-lived MSNBC show called Watch It! in
the 1990s). The Washington Post claimed the cancellation
prompted a “blizzard of backlash,” but this is an overstatement. What it
produced was an entirely predictable response from the usual suspects in
politics and mainstream media who insist that Hasan was fired because he was a
Muslim speaking truth to power.
Representative Ilhan Omar, a member of the left-wing
“Squad” notable for her frequent expressions of anti-Semitism (and a regular
guest of Hasan’s), was crestfallen. Hasan is “one of the most brilliant and
most prominent Muslim journalists in the U.S.,” she posted on X. “It is deeply
troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim
bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices.” Omar is, as usual, lying: It is
anti-Semitism, not anti-Muslim bigotry, that is disturbingly rampant at the
moment.
No matter. She had plenty of help attempting to make
Hasan into a symbol of Islamophobia. Hasan’s program “has felt like an oasis on
air and more needed than ever,” Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American activist,
posted on X. “He should be amplified, not shut down.” For those unfamiliar with
Erakat’s views, in 2022, as part of a program sponsored by anti-Israel group
Nonviolence International, she said, “Palestinians will not attack Jews because
they are Jewish” but “because they are their military occupiers and
oppressors.” On another panel at the University of Illinois, she said, “Zionism
is a bedfellow of Nazism and Anti-Semitism.”
Likewise, a representative of IfNotNow—whose main
congressional supporter is Squad member Representative Rashida Tlaib, recently
censured by the House for her anti-Semitism—called Hasan “a vital voice holding
those in power to account, providing a space for those questioning
unconditional U.S. support for Israel” and saw the cancellation “as part of the
sharp rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate.” Kenneth Roth, former head of the
moral rot that is the NGO Human Rights Watch, said the show’s cancellation was
“outrageous” and suggested that Hasan was fired for being “an outspoken critic
of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.”
Several media outlets argued that, although Hasan’s
ratings were consistently poor, MSNBC should have kept him on air. Why? Because
they considered him an effective Internet troll on behalf of the left.
“Although Hasan was not among MSNBC’s top-rated stars, his segments often went
viral on social media, where users celebrated his takedowns of conservatives
such as former Trump adviser John Bolton and Israeli government adviser Mark
Regev,” the Washington Post noted. This, according to
mainstream media’s most elite, is a good thing: “As Americans get more and more
of their news from shared posts from news show segments, Hasan’s online
amplification of his interviews put him on the cutting edge of the future of
journalism.”
Others lamented Hasan as a silenced voice of the people
who challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Writing in the Nation,
John Nichols, who co-authored a book with multimillionaire socialist Senator
Bernie Sanders titled It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, clearly
doesn’t understand that cable news is a business, not a nurturing nonprofit
drum circle for talkers on the left. “We need more cable hosts who practice
accountability journalism, in the way that Mehdi Hasan has so ably done,”
Nichols wrote. Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post lamented
that the cancellation of Hasan’s show was evidence that even left-leaning MSNBC
was becoming a tool of the Democratic Party “as opposed to a news outlet that
upholds left-wing values.” He noted that MSNBC had given shows to several
former Biden administration officials, including former press secretary Jen
Psaki, who is described as taking “an increasingly prominent role” at the
network.
How odd to read that by firing Hasan, MSNBC was losing a
crucial, independent voice criticizing the administration. After all, in an
interview earlier this year, the Guardian characterized Hasan
as speaking about Joe Biden “with the zeal of a convert.” Hasan told the paper,
“Joe Biden has done a lot, more than any president since LBJ, some might say
since Roosevelt.” He added, “I never imagined I would say this—I was born in 1979—I
think he’s the most impressive president of my lifetime.”
Hasan, who was born in the UK but became a U.S. citizen,
cut his teeth at Al Jazeera and The Intercept—the first owned by the
terror-sponsoring emirate of Qatar and the second a far-left website. He also
expressed noxious views about non-Muslims and LGBTQ people. Resurfaced video
from years ago shows a younger Hasan comparing non-Muslims to animals and
homosexuality to pedophilia. These were beliefs he later claimed were merely
bouts of “youthful enthusiasm” about which he says he professed his guilt several
times in articles and Twitter threads over the years—which he then celebrated
himself for announcing. As he told The Wrap, “rather than bury them, I chose to
raise them myself in a Twitter thread over the weekend to try and urge us all
to reckon with our prejudices and to challenge hate speech—whether witting or
unwitting—wherever we find it.” He has also been credibly accused of plagiarism
by journalist Lee Fang, also a veteran of the Intercept, who found that Hasan
had copied entire paragraphs without attribution from a US News &
World Report article about spanking.
Hubris is the Hasan brand. When he worked at Al Jazeera,
he posted on Twitter a clip of himself interviewing a Trump campaign official
with the observation: “Hey US media folks, here, I would argue immodestly, is
how you interview a Trump supporter on Trump’s lies.” Perhaps he should have
spent more time learning how to argue modestly, given the limits of his
talents. He once told a reporter that he “used to worry” that MSNBC would find
him “too edgy, too iconoclastic.” As it turns out, he was just too predictably
partisan and uninteresting to his own viewers—and simply too appalling in the
degree to which he crossed the line into anti-Semitism—even as he was clearly a
hero to himself. As the New York Times noted in a review of
his book: “Like Rambo, he says, he loves to lay a booby trap. ‘Boom!’ he
writes, going on to describe how satisfying it is to watch the crestfallen look
on his opponent’s face once the trap has been sprung” to provide that “showstopper
moment.”
With the cancellation of his show, Hasan finally got the
showstopper moment he truly deserved.
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