How Mehdi Hasan's "big mouth" launched his career

The former MSNBC journalist on his Twitter addiction, what's killing the media, and why he won’t go to your party.

Mar 26, 2024

Photo courtesy Mehdi Hasan.

When news broke in late November that MSNBC and sister streaming network Peacock were canceling liberal journalist Mehdi Hasan’s shows, many fans suspected that the Muslim broadcaster was being silenced for his strong views on the Israel-Hamas war.

“I did use those shows to offer an alternative to a lot of what’s out there on mainstream television: trying to humanize Palestinians, trying to platform Palestinian voices, trying to offer a critique of what Israel is doing,” the British-born Hasan, now based in Washington, DC, tells Depth Perception. “But as for why those shows were canceled, you’d have to ask MSNBC.” Hasan says the network did not tell him its reasoning. (MSNBC did not respond to Depth Perception’s inquiries.)

Hasan was offered the chance to remain as a guest anchor and on-air analyst, but in January he announced that he was leaving the organization. “I’m someone who has a big mouth, a lot of opinions,” says Hasan, who is known for his sometimes combative interview style. “I like to be where the action is. There was no way I could do a kind of semi-job. I needed a full-time platform to get my voice out there.”

So late last month, Hasan soft-launched Zeteo, a Substack-based media organization that currently has four other employees. (He also recently joined the Guardian US as a regular columnist.) In April, Zeteo will kick off a weekly show modeled on what Hasan did at MSNBC. “It’s a straightforward politics/interview/opinion show,” he says. “Monologue. Big guests. Panels.” Hasan will also do a podcast, with “some really interesting guest co-hosts who are going to rotate in and out.” He declined to name any of these contributors, but emphasized that Zeteo “is not a one-man band.”

Hasan was kind enough to take time out of launching his media company to answer Depth Perception’s Leading Questions. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

Blue text on a white background that reads “LEADING QUESTIONS”

Why did you become a journalist?

I wish I had this great, Marvel-type origin story, but I don’t. I became a journalist because I didn’t know what else to do. I knew what I didn’t want to do. I graduated from Oxford in the year 2000. I did Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Most people who do that degree either go and be a prime minister, like David Cameron — they go into politics — or they go into, like, banking, management consultancy, investment. And I knew I didn’t want to do that.

In the summer of 2000, most of my peers at university already had jobs lined up, and I had nothing…. And I thought, “Why don’t I just try [journalism]? I’ve got a big mouth. I’m interested in the news and politics.” So I sent off a bunch of begging letters to people, and I managed to get a very, very junior role in the ITV newsroom. (ITV is kind of the British version of NBC.) And that was where I got my foot in the door of journalism. It wasn’t some great mission that I had had my entire life to speak truth to power.

What is the purpose of journalism?

The purpose of journalism is to hold the powerful to account. It is to say the unsayable or say what needs to be said. I think it was Orwell who said, “Journalism is about saying stuff that people don’t want said. Everything else is public relations.” But for me it is very much about punching up, not punching down. And it’s this idea of really being combative, confrontational, interrogating both the evidence and the people offering the evidence, having a sense of skepticism.

Some of this stuff sounds cliché, but it’s not done enough in our industry, clearly. It’s one of the reasons people are upset with our media. It’s one of the reasons I was a square peg in a round hole in some of my previous jobs. I stand out in the fact that I want to do journalism a little bit differently.

What’s one app, tool, or service that you can’t do your work without?

I hate to say this, because it will make Elon Musk happy, but it is still Twitter — I refuse to call it X. I can't live without Twitter. It’s a) an addiction and b) professionally, it’s still unique in terms of connecting you to people you could otherwise not be connected to. I don’t know of any other platform — not Facebook, not Instagram, not Threads — where you can actually, directly be either publicly engaging or privately DMing with world leaders, world-famous celebrities, real people who have just broken into the news for some reason or another. It is still a unique platform in that way, despite the myriad ways in which Musk has undermined it and made it a horrible place to be 24/7.

What interview of yours are you proudest of?

One that I particularly enjoyed and has had a great positive impact both on the world and on my own career was my interview with Erik Prince [founder of the private security firm Blackwater] for Al Jazeera a few years back. It was for a show called Head to Head at the Oxford Union, which is in front of a live audience. And I grilled him on his relationship with Trump, on alleged war crimes in Iraq.

It went viral at the time. It introduced me to an American audience in a way that I hadn’t been introduced before, and it was covered by all the American media. It was, I think, interview journalism as it should be done: well-prepared, well-briefed, competent. And it also actually had real-world consequences. Based on what Prince had said to me that contradicted what he said to Congress, [Rep.] Adam Schiff referred Prince to the [U.S. Department of Justice, alleging that] he had perjured himself to Congress. Obviously, the Trump DOJ never took it anywhere. But that was something I’m proud of.

A Story America Needs to Hear

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In Long Lead’s podcast Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right, host Garrett Graff asks the existential questions: How did America get the far right so wrong? And what will it take now to get it right?

What interview of yours do you most regret?

I would go back to the Head to Head series at the Oxford Union. I did an interview with Prof. Richard Lindzen, the scientist from MIT who is a climate change denier, for want of a better word. A lot of people advised me “Don’t do this interview, it’s just amplifying climate change denial.” And I said, “No, he's a credible guy, and we need to have the debate. And I’ll be really tough — you know me.”

And it was actually a bit of a disaster because he was able to do the things that climate deniers and vaccine deniers and other such conspiracy theorists do when they’re given a mainstream platform. They obfuscate, they gaslight, they’re able to cherry pick evidence. They’re able to be a “Gish Galloper” in terms of rolling out lots of B.S. and overwhelming the interviewer and the audience with cherry-picked, selective evidence. And it was not the right format for scientific debate and discussion and argument. If I could go back, I wouldn’t have done that interview.

What’s the best journalistic career advice you ever received?

I’m not sure it’s the best, but it’s one I often refer to when I'm trying to make a decision about when to publish something or when to do an interview or when to share something I’ve learned.

It’s “Treat every story, every journalistic endeavor, like a loaded gun. You’ve just got to pull the trigger.” It’s a horrible analogy, I know, for Americans and for liberals. But this was told to me by a former colleague of mine, this idea that you just have to pull the trigger and do it now. You cannot wait for later on. There will never be a better time.

“The purpose of journalism is to hold the powerful to account. It is to say the unsayable or say what needs to be said.”

What is the worst journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?

It’s the general advice that you have to socialize with people and meet people excessively. This idea of making contacts is very important, obviously, for reporters and journalists, and I’ve never been an investigative journalist, so I can’t speak from there. But I worry that the advice that we need to make contacts and take people out to lunch and have meetings is great in terms of getting information. But it also leads to a very dangerous form of access journalism, where you’re compromised by your contacts and by your closeness to your subject.

I’ve always taken great pride in the fact that I’m not someone you’ll see on the kind of party scene. A) I’m not that kind of person, and b) there is a danger that if you’re spending all your evenings as a political journalist, for example, at receptions in DC or dinner parties with members of Congress, it’s very hard for you then to hold them to account when you’re interviewing them in a hallway or on a Sunday morning.

What is a widely accepted journalistic rule or norm that you hate?

It’s this idea that there always have to be two sides to a story. I think it’s one of the most pernicious pieces of advice and tropes and conventions in this current era. There aren’t two sides to climate change. There aren’t two sides to Holocaust denial. There are not two sides to racism. There’s certainly not two sides to the 2020 election. Joe Biden won, Donald Trump lost.

This idea that journalists are told “Well, you’ve got a quote from Democrat X, now go get a quote from Republican Y” is destroying our entire body politic. The bothsidesism of our media has returned with a vengeance in an election year, after we thought it had tamped down a bit in 2020 and 2021. And it’s dangerous. It’s deluded, it’s dishonest.

If you could write an all-access profile of anyone in the world, who would it be?

The obvious person is Donald Trump. There is a specific thing about Donald Trump that I would like to find out. To this day, there is a debate about Trump: Is he playing 3D chess? Is he this genius who’s throwing the press off and screwing over his opponents, or is he perhaps one of the dumbest, most deluded people to ever come close to public office anywhere in the world?

I think you need to have a real up-close, 24/7, behind-the-scenes follow around to understand how he does what he does, not just why he does it. I’m fascinated by his tweeting, for example. Like, is he tweeting from the toilet seat? Is this a strategic tweet that he’s putting out to distract from some other scandal? Or is it just that he grabs a phone and blurts out some verbal diarrhea?

I’m fascinated as to how he operates. I know I shouldn’t be, and I probably am going to have to take a shower after this interview for saying this. But as someone who spent, unfortunately, a decade of my life obsessed with this man through no choice of my own — but because he simply exists and runs the country — I would like to understand the behind the scenes. [I don’t trust] these other profiles. Trump people all lie. This idea that some Trump person leaked to the paper what he was doing? No, no, I need to see it.

What makes you think journalism is doomed?

Social media, because it has created entire bubbles in which you can cut yourself off from facts and figures and the reality of the world, for want of a better phrase. And you’re able to consume a diet of complete nonsense. One that is curated, specifically to you. You don’t ever see the other side of the argument, you don’t have to be exposed to things you don’t want to be exposed to. And that is destroying trust. That’s destroying any kind of shared reality. I don’t know how we can go forward if we don’t have a shared set of facts or real world experiences.

What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

Social media. It’s a double-edged sword. As dangerous and toxic as it’s been, it’s also been liberating. In terms of, for example, the biggest issue of our lifetime right now — Gaza — we would not know what was happening on the ground there were it not for Motaz [Azaiza] and Bisan [Owda] and all the other brave Palestinian journalists who use Instagram and TikTok and Twitter and other social media platforms to get the word out about a genocide happening just a few thousand miles away, with our taxpayer support.

So social media makes me hopeful about the future of journalism because it gives us a certain freedom that we didn’t have before. And personally, let me just do a shameless plug for Zeteo, my new media company. We are promoting via social media; people are coming to us via social media. So yes, it makes me hopeful.

How Mehdi Hasan's "big mouth" launched his career

The former MSNBC journalist on his Twitter addiction, what's killing the media, and why he won’t go to your party.

A Story America Needs to Hear

Further reading and viewing from Mehdi Hasan

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