Panels that flatten real ideological divides into entertainment

KILL LIST

Panels that flatten real ideological divides into entertainment

The lofty conception of panel debates— guests from either side meet for a civil exchange—is of no use. Democrat A spars theatrically with Republican B on contrived controversy C while reporter D and pundit E split the difference. On an episode of the “Powerhouse Roundtable,” on ABC’s This Week, guests squabbled over William Barr’s supposed U-turn on Trump, which conveniently allowed the host, Jon Karl, to plug his book on the subject. Sarah Isgur, a pundit who worked in Trump’s administration, claimed that the Mueller report largely “exonerated the president.” That wasn’t true. No one pushed back. this would happen and this would actually be talked about in the US in a serious manner—but, lo and behold, they’re actually really talking about it.”

Hasan’s interviews at The Intercept were framed as a corrective to mainstream media narratives. Since his days at the Statesman, Hasan has incorporated more media criticism into his work than perhaps any other journalist who is not on the media beat. In the UK, he lashed out regularly at right-wing pundits (“If he could provoke more established commentators into responding to him, that’s exactly what he wanted,” Cowley said); after moving to the US, he often accused major outlets of deferential coverage, and of normalizing Trump. In his Intercept column, he shredded interviews he found unimpressive—Norah O’Donnell on Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (“a crime against journalism”), Margaret Brennan on Ivanka Trump (“makes O’Donnell’s sit-down with MBS look like an interrogation”). On his podcast, he took aim at “guests from corporate-funded think tanks who run their mouths day in, day out on corporate-owned cable channels,” and slammed White House reporters for defending Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, after Michelle Wolf, a comedian, mocked her at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Andrea Mitchell, of NBC News, even suggested that the White House press secretary was owed an apology by the White House Correspondents’ Association,” Hasan said. “I mean, seriously? What is wrong with these people?”

Now that Hasan works for the same corporate-owned cable channel as Mitchell, it seems his perspective has changed. “I definitely get the access issue,” he said, of the need for shows not to alienate potential guests. “Not everyone has to have the same style; not everyone needs to do what I do.” He has praised Chris Wallace, of Fox News, and Jonathan Swan, of Axios, for eventually subjecting Trump to tough, on-camera interviews. He also likes CNN’s Jake Tapper and Pamela Brown, who is one of Hasan’s competitors in his Sunday-night slot. But he has continued to criticize rivals: assailing “lazy, unhelpful, ‘both sides’ media coverage” that equates progressive Democrats, including Ilhan Omar, with QAnon-adjacent Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and scolding Politico for granting credence to Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration adviser.

Hasan finds media criticism fun; he enjoys reading “gossipy media pieces.” His main motivations, though, are serious. “Race is a big part of it,” he said. “I am a Muslim journalist. I am an immigrant journalist. I am a brown journalist. That’s not how I define myself, but it is part of who I am, and therefore I’m not going to hide the fact that in an era where race is very much dominating most political stories, I’m gonna have a strong view on how we’re covering it.”

In 2018, Hasan hosted Ahmed, his old schoolmate, on his Intercept podcast, and brought up something that Ahmed had said in an interview with the New York Times magazine, about his identity as a child of immigrants in Britain: “We are the inheritors of the scars of empire but also the spoils of empire, and that kind of inside-outside state is totally ingrained in us, which is why, at a time like now where everybody’s being asked to pick a side, everything is binary.” The quote, Hasan said, resonated with him. He added, “Isn’t it the case

that it’s not just that we’re asked to pick a side, but both sides—both parts of our identity, call them East or West for simplicity—are insisting we pick them and are suggesting that we would be betraying our identity if we don’t pick one?” Later, Hasan discussed how he feels when people call him a “Muslim journalist”: “Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not,” he said. “It’s easy to say you don’t want to be pigeonholed by your race or your religion— but when there’s so few people like us around in public life, we can’t help but pigeonhole ourselves. Can we?”

Hasan is a practicing Muslim and has covered Islam and Muslim communities around the world ever since his first article for the Statesman, which was about the growth of Sharia-compliant finance. He emerged from “the first generation of incredibly assertive Western Muslims,” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a veteran commentator in the UK, told me recently. “He certainly was the first of many who then emerged—very confident of themselves, and very able to take on Western prejudices and push themselves into the public space.” Hasan has spoken out often against Islamophobia—including in the media industry—and has quoted the Koran and Islamic history in columns debunking stereotypes about his faith. He has also challenged his community, calling out, for example, anti-Semitism in its midst. Despite that, right-wingers have sometimes sought to tag him as a radical Islamist, often by recycling a speech he once gave in which, quoting the Koran, he referred to close-minded nonbelievers as “cattle.” Hasan has pointed out, in response, that he also referred to some Muslims as cattle, but in 2019 he apologized unreservedly for the comments. (He has also apologized for using homophobic language as a young man, writing on Twitter: “Growing up in a conservative faith community, where you didn’t interact with *actual* gay people, I ended up making insensitive remarks.”) He told me that his apology was “everything that needs to be said,” but added that he does get “annoyed” that his old comments still follow him around—“Muslims and brown people,” he told me, “get held to account twice as heavily for the things we mess up on as everyone else.”

Hasan came of age professionally at a time when Islam was a subject of intense global interest. He was a week into his job at Dimbleby’s show when the twin towers came down, and he spent the next few months trying to book “Great Muslim Guests” at the behest of his bosses. (“You can count on one hand the people you were able to book,” Hasan said.) He vehemently opposed the subsequent USled intervention in the Middle East. The need to prevent a war with Iran remains one of his major journalistic preoccupations. So, too, is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In May, after Israeli police raided a mosque and fired rubber-tipped bullets at Palestinian protesters, Hasan called out euphemistic US media coverage. “These are not ‘clashes,’ ” he said on his Peacock show. “There is an asymmetry of power here: one side is the occupier, the other side is occupied, and media coverage, political commentary, international interventions that don’t reflect this central fact— yeah, the fact of illegal occupation of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem—are all, I’m sorry to say, part of the problem.” The Daily Beast noted that Hasan—along with Ayman Mohyeldin, also of MSNBC—had done “something practically unheard of on an American television outlet . . . devoting substantial airtime to the Palestinian point of view.”

Hasan has also pointed his arrow at Trump, who launched his presidential bid a few months after Hasan moved to the US. Hasan likes to say that, as a Muslim immigrant journalist, he represents “the trifecta on the Trump hate list.” Nevertheless, he initially laughed off Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as the ravings of a candidate who would never win. “Hey @realDonaldTrump,” he tweeted after returning from an overseas trip, “I’m back baby!” After Trump won, Hasan’s mother urged him to keep his head down. But he felt obligated to speak, just as he had done in the UK in the long aftermath of 9/11. As we talked, I asked Hasan whether he finds it tiresome to have to say so much about his faith; overall, he told me, he does. “I don’t think any Muslim wants to write about how Islam isn’t a terrorist religion, how Muslims are not fifth columnists.” After he became a public figure in the UK, Hasan regularly fielded calls from TV bookers asking him to be a Great Muslim Guest; he didn’t always want to say yes, but “you watch TV and you watch someone screw up a defense of your community, and you’re

Arguments only work if the participants operate within a shared reality—no guarantee these days.

like, ‘Argh!’ You’re shouting at the TV. And I was one of those people who used to shout at the TV. Now I have an opportunity to be on TV and fix those issues. I felt like that was a burden I had to carry.”

The TV appearances could be physically grueling, requiring overnight trips and unsociable hours at a time when Hasan was starting a family. He and his wife have two children; they now live in the DC area. (He declined to say much more about his household, citing the abuse he gets for his work.) “My wife jokes—not in a good way—that I end up working twenty-four-seven,” he told me. Since January, he has had more free time, which he likes to spend on “mindless action movies,” including the Fast and Furious series. “When all you do all day long is think about the news, and think about human suffering, and think about how the world’s gonna end in one way or another, the way you relax is not to then do highbrow stuff.” Still, when called upon for his opinions as a talking head, he’ll answer. “I am a disputatious person,” he said. “I enjoy going on a debate and rhetorically beating someone up, or taking apart bad arguments. Do I enjoy the process? Yes, I’m not going to deny that. That’s who I am.”

In 2019, on an episode of Head to Head, Hasan interviewed Erik Prince, the Trump-allied founder of a private military contractor formerly known as Blackwater. For nearly fifty minutes, Hasan raked Prince over the coals with excruciating dexterity. He started with Blackwater’s complicity in civilian deaths during the Iraq War. Then he pilloried Prince for suggesting that private contractors be sent into Afghanistan, too. He referenced Hamid Karzai, the country’s past president, who called the proposal a nonstarter. Prince said he thought Karzai might have changed his mind; Hasan replied, “I literally asked his office on Friday, and they said

they’re dead against it.” The studio audience applauded. After a break, Hasan brought up Frontier Services Group, another Prince company, and its plan to establish a training center in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has committed human-rights abuses against ethnic and religious minorities. Prince suggested that Hasan had mistranslated an FSG press release; Hasan countered that his company had posted the document in English. More applause. Finally, Hasan asked Prince about his ties to Trump, including a meeting Prince took in August 2016 with campaign officials and other characters at Trump Tower. Hasan wanted to know why Prince didn’t disclose the meeting in testimony before Congress. Prince squirmed and eventually said that congressional record-keepers may have made a mistake on the transcript. Neither Hasan nor the audience bought it.

The Prince exchange was a testament to the depth of preparation—with researchers compiling hefty dossiers on guests, then role-playing as them in rehearsals, as Hasan learned to do on Dimbleby’s show—that the team at Al Jazeera put into big interviews. (“He knows how to frame a question, and he does so with precision,” Dimbleby told me.) The Prince encounter also illuminated a blurry line, in Hasan’s work, between interviewing and debating—the porous boundary between probing a subject and eviscerating him. Initially, the producers of Head to Head had discussed a format where Hasan would debate his guests while a third party moderated; in the end, they used Hasan as an interviewer, but his debater’s spirit became part of the show’s DNA. Head to Head was filmed at the Oxford Union, Britain’s most prestigious debate hall.

“He was a star at debating at Oxford,” James Macintyre, who worked with Hasan on Dimbleby’s show and at the Statesman, said. “It’s amazing how he’s managed now to make a living out of what he loves doing best.” Sophie Elmhirst, another former Statesman colleague, told me that Hasan “had this extraordinary debater’s energy,” and that being in editorial meetings with him was like being in “a kind of uni debating society.” (She added that, although Hasan’s TV career hasn’t surprised her, she partly expected to one day see him in Britain’s Parliament.) Ryan Grim, the DC bureau chief at The Intercept, told me that he “gave up” debating Hasan. “Even if he were arguing that the world was flat, and I was arguing that it was round, he would win the debate,” Grim said. “It was kind of pointless and hopeless for me.”

Hasan’s part-interview, part-debate approach is distinctive but not unique; it is, in fact, decidedly British. Not all British interviewers are like Hasan; some use subtler techniques to get under a subject’s skin. But a combative style has come to define British interviewing in the eyes of the world, incarnated not just by Hasan but also by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman—who, in 1997, asked an evasive Conservative politician the same question twelve times—and Andrew Neil, whom Boris Johnson conspicuously dodged ahead of the 2019 UK elections, and who, the same year, chewed up Ben Shapiro, a right-wing American pundit. Hasan has suggested that Paxman is so tough that he wouldn’t last “even five minutes on US cable news,” and describes Neil as “probably the toughest interviewer on British TV.”

When I reached Neil recently, he praised Hasan as a strong interviewer in the British mold. It’s been good, he said, to see him break through in the US, where interview subjects have traditionally been “allowed to tell their truth as opposed to the truth.” Yet when I asked him to compare their methods, Neil described himself as an “equalopportunity beater-upper”; Hasan, by contrast, comes at every subject from a leftwing vantage. “There’s probably no market in America for somebody like me, who, when faced with a left-winger, would come at them from the right and test their views— or, faced with a right-winger, would come at them from the left.”

As Trump rose to power, many American media critics, not to mention news consumers, expressed frustration with the established TV journalists who pitched softballs at his lying surrogates, then continued to invite them back on their shows. Over the course of his presidency, there was, it seemed, an expanding appetite for British-style maulings. Hasan’s sit-down with Prince went viral, as did a 2018 interview in which he nailed Steve Rogers, a Trump campaign adviser, with a handful of Trump lies. (“Let’s go on,”

Rogers said, to avoid having to answer for one of them. Hasan shot back: “You want to go on because you know it’s a lie.”) Hasan cites the Rogers appearance as a breakout moment: celebrities retweeted it; Seth Meyers invited Hasan on his late-night show and described the interview as “the template for talking to people within the Trump sphere.” The Rogers exchange has remained pinned to the top of Hasan’s Twitter feed, with the message: “Hey US media folks, here, I would argue immodestly, is how you interview a Trump supporter on Trump’s lies.”

Still, Hasan has often made the case that deferential American journalism traditions— even those he finds absurd, like reporters standing up when the president enters a room—channel deep-rooted cultural norms. His tough interview with Crenshaw was praised by many liberals, but not everyone enjoyed it. “Did anyone learn anything from this exchange?” Ross Garber, a law professor and CNN contributor, asked on Twitter. “Hasan appears to have hoped to take Crenshaw down. But compare his huffing, exasperated, righteous, talking-over approach with, for example, Tim Russert’s technique.” Hasan can sometimes bring more heat than light. And since Biden took office, promising a return to “normalcy,” some audiences have been happy for news coverage to simmer down. When Hasan interviewed Brian Deese, a top economic adviser to Biden, some liberal viewers accused him of being too harsh, even though the interview was not especially tough.

That doesn’t mean Hasan plans to adopt the American way. He is steadfastly devoted to fierce debate and believes that more of his TV news peers are coming around to his style. “You know what? The more of us who do it,” he said, “the fewer safe spaces there will be.”

Aiming to find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Hasan interrogation, I called up Arthur Laffer. An influential supply-side economist who has posited, with his eponymous curve, that it’s possible to cut taxes and increase tax revenue by spurring growth, Laffer advised politicians including Ronald Reagan and, more recently, Trump, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2014, Laffer appeared on Head to Head, where Hasan grilled him on his complicity in rising inequality and his track record of economic predictions. At one point, Hasan held up a napkin with Laffer’s curve on it—a reference to a meeting in DC, in 1974, at which Laffer drew the curve on a napkin for Dick Cheney. The “problem with your principles,” Hasan told Laffer, is that “they’re great on napkins. In the real world, they don’t work.”

Laffer told me that he loved the interview. He has since appeared with Hasan twice more, on UpFront. “This is not my first barbecue,” Laffer, who is eighty-one, said. “I’ve been in this framework and this environment for much of my life, and I thought it was about as good as any I’ve seen.” Laffer was referring mostly, though, to academic settings—like Milton Friedman’s workshops at the University of Chicago—and to interviews overseas; Hasan’s approach, he said, is “very rare” in US media. “I found his pushy style—his aggressive style—charming, and inclusive, and expository, and really, really helpful in bringing out the inner workings of the subject matter.” He told me that American friends who watched his Head to Head appearance were “very stressed” by it and found Hasan to be rude. But the Brits he knew enjoyed the sparring. “I wish Margaret Thatcher was still alive and I could have shown it to her,” he said. “She would have loved, loved, loved it.”

In today’s media landscape, there’s little incentive for public figures to subject themselves to hostile interviews; they can, especially on the right, simply appear on shows and networks that will massage their egos. Yet there are those like Laffer out there who enjoy a vigorous exchange. Many politicians go for it because they value attention of any kind, or because they possess the kind of confidence that makes them think they’ll be the one who comes out on top where others have failed. Some waltz onto a cable news set without doing any homework on the interviewer. Taken together, these factors have provided Hasan a regular stream of guests on his shows, despite his reputation. “In theory, should we be concerned about people not wanting to come and do interviews with me?” he asked. “Sure. But has it actually happened in practice? I’m

pleasantly surprised to say no. We’re still doing very well.”

At NBCUniversal, Hasan’s booking odds have been enhanced somewhat by a change in format; unlike the journalistic utopia of Head to Head, with limited runs of forty-plusminute interviews built on months of preparation, he now has nightly episodes to fill, each with far shorter segments. At more than sixteen minutes, his interview with Crenshaw, for instance, was long by cable standards, and required dropping an ad break. (It’s no wonder Bolton felt like his fifteen minutes with Hasan dragged on forever.) On American cable news, “you’re expected to paint with a broad brush,” Hasan told me. “I have to work this out on a nightly basis. What is the right balance? What is the right tone? What is the right guest selection?” Conaway, of NBCUniversal, told me that Hasan’s team has been working to tease out “what Rumsfeld might have called the ‘unknown unknowns’ ”—attributes that Hasan may not be aware he has. The next step, she said, is growing his “dynamic range,” mixing his intensity with bashfulness and humor. “What Mehdi turns out to be—that I think an American audience loves, but did not know that they were gonna get out of him—is he’s adorable,” Conaway said. “He makes you love him.”

His tack seems to be working. He’s risen quickly through MSNBC’s ranks; occasionally, he has filled in as a guest host for Chris Hayes. The ratings for Hasan’s MSNBC show have held up well against those of his Sunday-night colleagues (though they tend to trail Fox and CNN, and lag behind the viewership of MSNBC’s top-rated weeknight hosts). Peacock does not publish viewing figures, but Conaway told me that Hasan, along with another host, Zerlina Maxwell, has been the “heart and soul” of its news programming so far—establishing a foundation and raising its profile whenever clips from his show go viral online. When I asked Conaway, who used to work on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, whether Hasan could one day match Maddow’s enormous popularity, she replied, “Absolutely.” Griffin told me, “I think he’s gonna end up a player.”

At the moment, Hasan’s approach poses perhaps one question more than any other: Even if he can book contentious guests, should he? Since the early days of his career, he has warned about the dangers of handing extremists a media platform. And yet to watch some of his early interviews is to glimpse back at a less tense time for discourse, when disagreements felt more civil than they do today and debating more of an intellectual exercise. (Often that was a sign of complacency, as much as anything, and not necessarily cause for nostalgia.) He once ended a conversation with Asad Durrani—the former head of Pakistan’s intelligence services, who referred to dead children as “collateral damage”—by telling Durrani that although he had expressed “some pretty appalling views,” he had done so “very confidently, very passionately”; in 2013, Hasan went toe to toe with a climate skeptic. Hasan told me that he wouldn’t interview a climate change denier today. “My views have probably hardened,” he said, “because I’ve seen the damage that’s been done by giving untrammeled, unrestricted platforms to extremists.”

Lately, when American media critics have made the case that news organizations should withhold platforms from harmful figures, their complaints have often been more about how journalists treat such people, rather than the fact of the platform itself; interviews with any subject can reveal something valuable if handled with vigilance and rigor, as Hasan has proved with Rogers and Prince. But that doesn’t mean he’ll spar with anyone. Hasan has spoken about his practice of conducting “hygiene tests” to weed out meritless interlocutors. When Crenshaw came on, Hasan started by asking him to accept that Biden was the legitimate president. Crenshaw did, so the conversation proceeded.

In Hasan’s view, arguments only work if the participants operate within a shared reality—no guarantee these days. “I’m a debater,” he said. “I love debating ideas, debating people. But on two conditions: I will debate in good faith, and right now much of what we see in our media is done in bad faith, especially on the right. And I will debate with facts, and figures, and reason, and science, and qualifications. Like, you could pay me a million dollars—I’m never going to interview Marjorie Taylor Greene. Why? What would be the point?” cjr