According to JD Vance, journalist Mehdi Hasan is a “dummy”. The US vice president recently posted this epithet on X in response to Hasan cheekily implying Vance was being hypocritical for “lecturing the Europeans on free speech” at the Munich Security Conference while his boss Donald Trump was banning the Associated Press from White House events.
It is hardly the first time Hasan has got under the skin of powerful figures in US politics—and it is unlikely to be the last. Since moving to the US from his native UK more than a decade ago to host a show for Al Jazeera English, he has become known for his take-no-prisoners interviewing style and opinionated monologues, particularly at his later employer MSNBC. To describe him as “forthright” would be an understatement.
In November 2023, MSNBC cancelled Hasan’s two shows. Some fans, including Democratic politicians Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna, derided the decision to dump a prominent Muslim journalist and a staunch critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians just as the war in Gaza was ramping up.
MSNBC offered for him to stay on as a guest host and analyst, but he declined and left the network in January 2024. “It’s just not in my nature to sit on the bench,” he tells me on a visit to London.
As with many high-profile defectors from mainstream outlets, Hasan looked to the self-publishing platform Substack as a new home for his work. But while a solo Substack could have been “great for my ego and bank balance,” he says he wanted to “build something that will hopefully endure beyond me.”
“I was fed up with the way that especially US media organisations, but media organisations in general, were kind of pulling their punches on some of the big issues of the day, be it racism, the rise of fascism, the genocide in Gaza,” he tells me. “And I wanted to be able to have a platform where you didn’t have to look over your shoulder, you didn’t have to worry about the C suite or the corporate backers or the advertisers.”
So, in February 2024 he announced the launch of his own media company, Zeteo—an ancient Greek word meaning “to seek the truth, to seek out, to inquire”. Regular contributors include Naomi Klein, Greta Thunberg, Owen Jones and comedian Bassem Youssef. It now employs 11 full time staff and boasts over 650,000 followers on YouTube, as well as 350,000 subscribers on Substack. Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie has called it “one of the most successful and fastest growing [accounts] in Substack history.”
One potential risk of Substack’s subscription model is losing subscribers if you tell them things they don’t want to hear. Hasan acknowledges there is “a temptation, 100 per cent, to avoid the kind of contentious things that might upset your subscriber base.” Having attracted a particularly pro-Palestinian audience, for instance, Hasan acknowledges he lost some subscribers after he grilled the Greens’ US election candidate Jill Stein. But he gained even more subscribers who wanted to watch the full interview, so he isn’t too worried about some inevitable “churn”.
“The whole point of setting up Zeteo and going independent is to be independent. It would be insane then if I left MSNBC and corporate media because I wanted the freedom to say what I wanted to say, and now I’m not free because I’m worried about some people on the internet being mean to me,” he tells me.
Hasan still appears on cable news sometimes, but it continues to be a fraught medium for him. In October last year, Hasan appeared on CNN alongside conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky, who jibed on air, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off”—a reference to pager explosions in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah militants. Girdusky was later banned from appearing on the network again.
“After October 7th, there is a kind of weird, violent streak among some supporters of Israel,” he tells me. “That is the context we live in now. But I just want to put it in a broader perspective. If you’re in the western media, you are facing possible cancellation. It’s funny that right-wingers talk about cancel culture. The biggest victims of cancel culture have always been supporters of the Palestinian cause, whether on campus or in the media.
“But the reality is that the people who are facing the biggest threat are the journalists in Gaza who have been killed at a record level. The real tragedy is that the US media did not just crack down on critical coverage of Israel at home, but completely abandoned their peers and their colleagues in Gaza. Very shameful episode in western media history. I think journalists who didn’t say a word about their fellow journalists being gunned down and bombed in their homes in Gaza for 16 months... I think history will judge them harshly.”
Closer to home, how will history judge the US media’s coverage of the second Trump administration? “There is a real fear in the US mainstream media right now. People are keeping their heads down,” he says. “To use the phrase of fascism scholars like Timothy Snyder, there’s ‘anticipatory obedience’. They’re obeying in advance because they just don’t want the trouble that comes from picking a fight with an authoritarian government.”
How should the media be covering Trump, then? “One of my big frustrations with US media interviews,” he says, “is they’ll be interviewing a politician, and the politician will give some nonsense answer, and the interview will say, ‘well, thank you, but we have to move on’. No! My style of interviewing, you don’t move on, right? I don’t care what the next story is. We’ll stick with this one until we get an answer.
“And I think Trump always benefits from the fact that journalists move on, right? They ask a question. He says some nonsense. People get outraged for about an hour or two, and then we’re on to the next story of the next day, and he’s gotten away with the crap he said the day before.”
Despite his rather bleak indictment of the American media, he finds hope in the talents of the younger generation of journalists coming through, whom he now encounters in his “weird new role” as an employer. “I feel bad for [them] because of the lack of opportunities, because mainstream media is firing so many people and shutting down so many departments and cutting so many wages and benefits. It was very different when I became a journalist exactly 25 years ago.”
What does he look for in those trying for such entry-level positions today? “For me, it’s always been about the energy. I’m not the person who in any meeting appreciates the person who sits quietly in the corner. I’ve always been the person running my mouth, so I appreciate others who do too.” If they run their mouths enough, perhaps, one day, they might even piss off the vice president of the United States.
Listen to Ben’s full interview on our podcast or watch it on YouTube.
