21 minute read
Hagiographic obituaries of defective leaders
most part, unless you were an essential worker. We couldn’t be on the ground and cover stories in the way that we normally would, because we couldn’t get close to people. And so we started to rely on social media to find characters for stories, to get information from folks, and to get information from our politicians. But you have to have access to the internet to do that, right? And so that counted out a swath of the population, because you couldn’t reach them. Everybody’s not on Twitter. Twitter is not the entirety of this country. And sometimes I have to remind myself of that, and we remind our reporters of that as well. When we see something trending on Twitter—that’s not official polling. That’s just a composite of what folks think who are using Twitter. Especially if you talk about politics with people who tend to be a little more educated—they tend to be a little more liberal. And you can’t use that as the basis of reporting. And so it is important to consistently remind yourself of that.
NEASON Certainly we saw the danger in focusing on Twitter, what people are saying on Twitter, during the Trump administration—and even before he was in office, during the 2016 campaign. What have we learned in political journalism coming out of the Trump era and transitioning into the Biden era?
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HARPER I think it concerns the ways that information is passed, as we’re seeing misinformation influence large swaths of the population. Be it in relation to politics and campaigns, or conspiracy theories about all kinds of things—the backgrounds of politicians, or the behavior of politicians. Be it things like the vaccine, or covid: How do you keep yourself from getting sick? I think that all of us are paying attention now. And the politicians are paying attention now. It’s kind of funny, because sometimes we watch some of those congressional hearings about social media and disinformation, and it is very clear that a lot of our lawmakers have no idea how some of these platforms work. So identifying the immense power that these platforms have, while also at the same time understanding that not everybody is on these platforms, is something that I think has become very clear since 2016.
We have conversations all the time: Do we give our air to someone who is going to spout conspiracy theories? Are we going to write about the event in which so-and-so politician spouted conspiracy theories? How we’ve dealt with it is, we run a lot of fact checks.
NEASON Do you see it as part of your responsibility to figure out what to do when the fact check isn’t enough?
HARPER That’s totally part of my job. It’s a layered approach, and I’m lucky that we have so many platforms, because it’s about reaching people where they are and giving them the information that we know is true. You know, there is a saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Well, I’m going to try my darndest. I am going to make sure that we are saying the correct information over and over and over and over again.
KILL LIST
Hagiographic obituaries of defective leaders
After the death of Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense under Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, some journalists depicted his legacy in a false glow; a few deployed the vague word “controversial.” The AP went so far as to suggest, in an early headline, that Rumsfeld was a victim of the Iraq War—even though he’d orchestrated it—calling him “a cunning leader undermined by Iraq war.” (George Packer got it right in The Atlantic: “Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history,” he wrote. “Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction.”)
HARPER This is the largest audience that I have ever been in charge of providing content for, because it is everyone. ABC is one of the largest news organizations in this country. And that’s why it’s so important to have a newsroom that is skilled in finding different ways to reach different segments of the population. Our audience in the morning—we know that’s an overwhelmingly female audience; a lot of moms are watching in that audience. That’s a different audience from our World News Tonight audience, which is the most serious audience. On our streaming platforms, those audiences might be a little younger, right? Because the folks who are streaming, they don’t have cable. All of our platforms have different specific demographics. The entirety of ABC News—the audience is very broad. And so sometimes it’s about finding a way to present the fact that there’s common ground in stories in order to reach the broadest amount of people, especially when you’re dealing with a story that doesn’t affect a large amount of people. And if it’s a narrow segment of the population that your story is covering, it’s about finding ways to pull people who might not necessarily click on that story or watch that story or watch that documentary—pulling them in so that they can learn something new. That’s the beautiful thing about working for a news organization that reaches so many people. You have the power to expose your audiences to things and people that they’ve never thought about and stories that they never thought that they would hear. Especially when things are really important, you have the power to reach everybody and give them the information that they need to know.
NEASON So what’s on your radar?
HARPER For me, after the past election cycle, it’s really about covering the Biden administration and making sure that they’re
following through on a lot of the promises that they’ve made. This is the first time we’ve seen a president directly confront the notion of institutional racism in a way as plain as Joe Biden has. But it’s about making sure that that’s not just lip service. It is making sure that we are holding his administration accountable every single day. So, for example, I wrote about police reform. They decided that they were not going to do a police oversight commission. And that was one of the promises for his first one hundred days. That’s fine. They said they were going to focus on passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Well, what are the actions that you are taking to ensure that the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act gets to the president’s desk to be signed into law? I raised that in the newsletter that I write. It’s sometimes just the idea of raising that question and putting it into folks’ minds, to effect a whole news cycle.
Biden talked about the Daunte Wright shooting. But before he acknowledged the pain and the anger within the AfricanAmerican community, he talked about looting. And I raised the idea of, you know, there are so many people who are out there who would wish that the Biden administration would address police reform with the same urgency that the Biden administration addressed looting. That’s how my friends and my family are thinking. That’s how people I know in my neighborhood are thinking. But it’s not necessarily how the folks who are in the White House press corps are thinking. So that’s why it’s important to have folks that come from a variety of viewpoints and different places and different backgrounds, in order to raise those ideas.
NEASON That’s sort of a deviation from really ingrained ideas about what the role of the journalist is. We’ve been having this conversation across journalism for years, about notions of objectivity: what we mean when we use that word, what it looks like in practice and in coverage. What it sounds like you’re describing is a reporter taking an active role—that it’s not just showing up to the press gaggle or whatever, hearing what whoever is speaking says, and then writing the story about what they said. Like you were saying, if what you’re hearing in your neighborhood and in your family is reflecting one thing, and that’s not necessarily what’s coming out of the mouths of politicians and reporters, you’re saying, Hey, what about this? As opposed to just being there to sort of receive.
HARPER I’ll push back. To me, raising a question—I don’t think that is a violation of any notion of objectivity. I’m not going to advocate for one politician over the other. I held President Trump just as accountable as I hold Joe Biden. But, you know, journalism, just like politics, is about the people. And, you know, you write for your audience. If there’s a question that you’re hearing people ask, it is your duty to ask that question. These are the things that I raised to our team: It’s not that I have a personal agenda in asking this question. But I know that there are frustrations within the Black community in the way that the Biden administration is addressing police reform. There’s folks who are out on the street protesting about it every single day. So it is our duty to hold folks accountable. And it’s not just the Biden administration. It is state leaders and local leaders in our domestic coverage, looking at police organizations and holding their leaders accountable. It’s about asking the questions that folks want the answers to. That’s what our job is. And the notion of objectivity—I think we all come from different places, right? So I think as long as you are not in a newsroom advocating for any certain policy—I’m not advocating for any policy. I’m asking a question because that’s what folks want to know. And I’ll continue to do that.
NEASON How we experience the world is different based on these different characteristics that we have. So what does it look like for you, as a newsroom leader, when people on your teams are not all experiencing things that perhaps are faced by the communities they are reporting on—and on behalf of?
HARPER It’s important to work for a news organization where you can have those conversations. I’ve had those conversations with folks across our network, where I can talk about the way that I experience the world as a Black woman. And what can we glean from those experiences to strengthen our coverage? Sometimes there’s just nuance when we’re covering these different areas, when we’re covering these issues, and if you don’t necessarily come from those communities, you might not get that nuance. It makes our coverage the best it can be when we have folks who come from all kinds of places.
NEASON What do you see as your main challenge moving forward?
HARPER I mean, I think the way that we cover news, just logistically, because of the pandemic, has changed things. The world has changed. In terms of the content of coverage, I think the challenge is to find ways to take topics that can be considered very dense and make them digestible and easily understood for audiences. It’s hard to talk about an issue that’s big, like climate change, right? And to cover things that are state or local issues, and find through lines. We are always trying to find a through line to get people to understand that topic’s significance. cjr
Mehdi Hasan’s challenging transatlantic rise
CABLE NEWS
The Debater
AUTHOR Jon Allsop
ILLUSTRATOR Jing Li L ast October, Mehdi Hasan, a British journalist who lives in the United States, interviewed John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, on Peacock, the NBCUniversal streaming service where Hasan had just debuted a nightly show. Bolton had been a regular news guest since the summer, when he published a book excoriating Trump; he sometimes faced awkward questions about his work for the president, but the focus of interviews was usually on Trump’s threat to America. On Peacock, Hasan asked Bolton about the prospect of Trump refusing to accept the election result, should he lose. Then the questions took a turn. Hasan pressed Bolton on his refusal to vote for Joe Biden. And he went back in time, to Bolton’s encouragement of the George W. Bush administration to invade Iraq.
“Verbal abuse is the president’s strong suit, of course,” Hasan said. “But then again, when he says in response to you and your book that you’re a, quote, ‘warmonger’—that all you, quote, ‘wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody’—is he correct about that?”
Bolton tried to deflect the question—it was “about as simplistic as Trump’s criticisms,” he said. But Hasan would not be waved off. “What I’m wondering,” he asked, “is all those thousands of people who died in Iraq, all of those innocent Iraqi civilians—men, women,
children, killed by US air strikes, some of them in massacres, at Haditha, Mahmudiyah, Balad—none of those weigh on your conscience? None of those deaths ever keep you up at night?”
Bolton didn’t answer directly, so Hasan asked again, and then a third time; at one point, he also asked whether Bolton fears one day being brought to justice for war crimes. As the barrage continued, Hasan moved on to grill him about Iran. Bolton grew flustered. “I have never said anything other than what I believe,” he told Hasan, “and we are now, sir, twenty minutes into this interview, which you said was for fifteen.” (Less than fifteen minutes had gone by.)
Hasan, who is forty-two, with stubble, piercing eyes, and thick, perpetually skeptical eyebrows, has built a global reputation on conducting devastating interviews—first at Al Jazeera English, now at NBCUniversal. In late November, Hasan gave both barrels to Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, a conservative network that was then cresting in popularity thanks to its sycophantic coverage of Trump and his election denialism; Hasan played Ruddy a conspiratorial clip from Newsmax and asked, “Do you feel embarrassed to be running nonsense like that on your network and calling it ‘news’?” In late February, he added to his schedule a prime-time Sunday-night show on MSNBC, and invited Dan Crenshaw, a Republican congressman from Texas who had recently called him a “fake partisan ‘journalist.’ ” On air, Hasan pulled up a chart showing that, contrary to the Republican narrative about immigration, apprehensions at the border had already been rising when President Biden took office, thanks to a law through which Trump had effectively shuttered the US to most migrants without allowing them to apply for asylum. (The Biden administration has kept the policy mostly in place.) Crenshaw said he didn’t know where Hasan had gotten his data. Hasan said it was sourced from Customs and Border Protection.
In addition to these bouts, Hasan has delivered more typical MSNBC fare: segments with network contributors, public health experts, anti-Trump Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers and officials. Hasan often challenges these guests, too. He attacked the border crisis from a different angle with Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. (“This isn’t family separation,” Hasan said, of the administration’s treatment of migrant children, “but it’s still an outrage and unacceptable, is it not?”) In a monologue about Barack Obama’s memoir, Hasan eviscerated the papering-over of his use of drones. Hasan has been scathing about the centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for their support of the filibuster; at one point, he asked, as he did with Bolton, how they sleep at night—albeit rhetorically, since, unlike Bolton, Manchin and Sinema have yet to subject themselves to the Hasan treatment. Frequently, he goes off on breathless rants timed against the clock. He also convenes thoughtful, substantive discussions on topics as varied as vaccination, the war in Yemen, and Palestine. In April, he interviewed Noam Chomsky, the veteran left-wing academic—a unicorn sighting, by MSNBC standards.
Hasan’s approach can be seen as an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms in general and complacent coverage of Trump in particular. At the top of his first show on MSNBC, he laid out a mission statement: “People sometimes say journalists shouldn’t be biased,” he said. “No. Journalists should have a bias: a bias toward democracy.” He has called out Trump’s lies and racism—even his fascism—when many journalists still felt squeamish about doing so. “Mehdi saw immediately what was at stake, for media and democracy as a whole, partly because he comes from outside the US,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism at New York University who has appeared on Hasan’s program, told me—enabling him “to make that leap to say ‘Yes, it can happen here.’ ”
Hasan’s sensibility presents a hybrid, of sorts—part MSNBC, part The Takeaway, part Democracy Now!, part something else. Genuinely tough interviewers are rare on American TV, as are strong progressive voices; Hasan is both. “He has a very clear point of view,” Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at NYU who has appeared on Hasan’s Peacock show, told me. “Nobody’s gonna accuse him of being a ‘he said, she said,’ phonyneutral journalist. But I think he very smartly includes being critical of liberal politicians— from the left—as part of his mission.” In an
era that has exposed the failings of triangulation and false equivalence, Hasan has shown that you can scrutinize “both sides” from a place of unabashed moral clarity.
Phil Griffin, who hired Hasan while president of MSNBC, was impressed by his interview style and saw him as the kind of talent who could help anchor his network’s push into streaming. “He’s very polite, but he’s tough,” Griffin told me. “He doesn’t let you get away with the thing that we hate most: talking points, or generic statements. It is good television, and it is thoughtful television, and you know the guest better prepare if they’re gonna come on that show.” I asked Griffin whether a desire for greater ideological diversity had factored into the decision to hire Hasan; the progressive left, including Bernie Sanders, has often criticized MSNBC as a bastion of the Democratic establishment. “I would disagree with the sensitivity of the Bernie Sanders campaign,” Griffin replied. “Our best interviewers are gonna hold you accountable whether you’re a Democrat or a liberal—or whatever. I knew that Mehdi would hold everybody accountable.” Laura Conaway, who heads The Choice from MSNBC, a news streaming channel under the Peacock umbrella, told me, “My first impression about Mehdi was that he’s what I’ve heard referred to sometimes, in different contexts, as a lot of horse—he’s just a really, really strong performer.”
Hasan was born in 1979, in Swindon, a town in the southwest of England, to Hyderabadi Muslim parents who immigrated to the United Kingdom from India. His father was always argumentative about politics; in the eighties—amid widespread disavowal, across the Muslim world, of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses—he bought a copy, telling skeptical friends that one should always read the other side of an
argument. When Hasan was a child, his family moved to North London, where Hasan attended what he has described as “a posh white-majority private school which was switching to become very brown.” He then went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, or PPE—a degree that is a long-standing rite of passage for the British political elite. As a student, Hasan appeared in a school play alongside Riz Ahmed, who is now a major Hollywood star. Recently, Ahmed appeared on Hasan’s MSNBC show. “I remember even then you being the debating champion—the vicious debating king,” Ahmed said. “No one wanted to go toe to toe with you. So I think it’s no surprise what you’re doing right now.”
That remark appears not just to have been guest-to-host flattery. In interviews with a dozen people who know Hasan, I heard repeatedly that he was made for the screen— a live wire who dominates every room he enters, and who is the same off the air as he is on it. Not that there was anything inevitable about his trajectory to cable. As he prepared to graduate from Oxford, he applied for media jobs out of a “process of elimination,” he told me. “I looked around and said, ‘Well, I can’t do any of the other, normal jobs that people would do. I’ve got a big mouth. I’m interested in politics. Maybe this’ll work for me.’ ”
Hasan landed an entry-level freelance position at ITN, a British production company, then worked at various networks in off-air roles. One of them was with Jonathan Dimbleby, a prominent British broadcaster who employed Hasan as a researcher and producer. Dimbleby recalled that, during preparation sessions for interviews, when Hasan was supposed to be role-playing as an upcoming interviewee, he would share his own opinions. “He wasn’t, as it were, trying to persuade me about what I should do so much as he was irrepressible,” Dimbleby told me. Dorothy Byrne, Hasan’s boss at a different network, Channel 4, remembered him inhaling political news and blogs. “I thought I would get worn out if I had as many passionate views as Mehdi Hasan has,” she said.
In 2009, Hasan went to work at the New Statesman, a progressive magazine, where he covered Britain’s Labour Party and wrote features and rapid-fire, trenchant blogs attacking austerity economics and Western military intervention in the Middle East, among other targets. (That wasn’t quite Hasan’s first gig in print: in a curious turn, he briefly interned at The Spectator, a conservative magazine that was edited, at the time, by Boris Johnson. Hasan recalls helping Johnson sign Christmas cards while Johnson sang carols.) Soon, Hasan found himself in high demand as a pundit on TV and radio shows. Jason Cowley, the editor of the Statesman, tried to prep him for his debut appearance on Question Time, a prestigious weekly debate panel on the BBC. “We said, ‘Look, just be calm. We don’t want to be represented by a left-wing firebrand—we want to show people that the New Statesman is more nuanced,’ ” Cowley said. “Of course, he was a left-wing firebrand.” Hasan “dominated” the panel, Cowley recalled. “The next day, when we came into the office, we’d had a surge of subscriptions from people who had seen him.”
As in the US, voices of the left have traditionally been underrepresented in the British media. Many of Hasan’s stances from his Statesman days are unexceptional by today’s standards—since Hasan covered the Labour Party, it has shifted leftward—but at the time he was a rare, staunchly progressive voice in the mainstream forum. Not that his positions followed a formulaic script. “With a lot of commentators, you know exactly what their line is going to be, because their various views fit in with each other,” Byrne said. “Mehdi isn’t like that.” Once, he sparked a ruckus on Twitter—where he was, and remains, active— after he wrote a column opposing abortion, calling it incompatible with his worldview. “Isn’t socialism about protecting the weak and vulnerable, giving a voice to the voiceless? Who is weaker or more vulnerable than the unborn child?” he asked. “Yes, a woman has a right to choose what to do with her body—but a baby isn’t part of her body.” (Hasan stressed to me that then, as now, he supported laws guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose, and that he said as much in the column; he also said that he wouldn’t make the point in the same way today. “I upset a lot of people, and I regret that,” he told me. “Looking back, it was unnecessarily provocative and gratuitous.”)
In 2012, Hasan moved to HuffPost UK, where he worked as political director. (The Statesman continued to copublish his columns.) The same year, he became the host of a show on Al Jazeera English called The Cafe, in which he moderated topical debates, then piloted a program that would later become Head to Head—his breakout long-form interview show, which he hosted until last year and which featured Hasan challenging public intellectuals, senior global politicians, and military leaders whose values and records typically conflicted with his own.
Eventually, Hasan left HuffPost and, in 2015, decamped for Washington, DC, to host another Al Jazeera show called UpFront, a weekly program that incorporated elements of his other formats. The move was prompted in part by his wife—also of Indian descent, and who grew up in Texas. When she told Hasan that she wanted to relocate, his response, at first, was to ask what “a lefty, Muslim, British journalist is gonna do in the United States.” Still, he was fascinated by American politics and media; on trips to visit his wife’s family, he’d seen Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC. Plus, he said, “there is that Beatlesesque, can-youconquer-America aspiration.” Hasan became a US citizen last year, just in time to vote in the presidential election.
Hasan sharpened his voice as a commentator on American politics at The Intercept, where he signed on as a columnist in 2017; he later hosted a podcast and online videos there. His hiring was championed by Glenn Greenwald, with whom Hasan remains friendly, and by Betsy Reed, The Intercept’s editor in chief, who credits Hasan with bringing a “refreshing” outsider’s perspective to the site. “He was one of the first people to start talking about this idea of court-packing,” Reed told me. “Initially, I thought, Okay, come on. This is just a British person’s fantasy that
