Mehdi hasan

Tuesday

Joshua Topham

What Medhi Hasan should have told the New Right

Progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan recently went viral for his “debate” with 20 so-called conservatives on the popular YouTube channel Jubilee. The program is formatted such that Hasan makes a claim, and then his opponents, seated in a circle around him, race each other to the chair opposite Hasan when they wish to refute a claim. When the claim, “Donald Trump is defying the US Constitution” came up, contestants lunged for the chair – not to deny the claim, but to dismiss the Constitution outright. Hasan, it seems, was ready to argue that Trump is defying the Constitution, but he was utterly unprepared to defend the document on its merits. We shouldn’t read too much into this gathering of the chronically online.

Tuesday

Cockburn

Greener pastures for ex-congressman Mark Green

The Republican majority in the House is down to +7: Representative Mark Green of Tennessee’s 7th congressional district officially resigned on Monday. Green was the subject of a rather messy scandal in his final term: his wife of 35 years initiated divorce proceedings last September, wrongly accusing the congressman of having an affair with a 32-year-old female Axios reporter in the filing. He was, in fact, cheating on her with a different young woman, who exonerated the reporter. “We’ve all had to basically grieve the loss of the person that we thought was our father,” Green’s daughter Catherine told local press at the time. “My dad sells himself in politics as being a Christian, conservative family man... His actions in the last, whatever, year have not been that.

Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee

Tuesday

Cockburn

CNN boots commentator Ryan Girdusky for Hezbollah pager joke

Conservative commentator and 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky found his punditry gig at CNN to be short-lived after the network kicked him off air Monday for making a joke about Hezbollah’s exploding pagers. Girdusky was sparring with two progressive co-panelists, Ashley Allison and Mehdi Hasan, on CNN Newsnight over whether Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden could be reasonably equated to the 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue. Girdusky asserted that Democrats were smearing Trump’s supporters by accusing them of attending a Nazi rally, to which Hasan replied, “If you don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing — stop saying,” presumably meaning to end that sentence with “Nazi things.

girdusky

Thursday

Cockburn

Mehdi Hasan gets demoted

MSNBC has finally found a host that's de trop for them. Outspoken critic of Israel Mehdi Hasan had his show canceled by the network. Semafor announced the shake up on Thursday morning as part of broader changes to MSNBC’s weekend programming. Hasan’s show has been canceled but he will remain with the network as an on-camera analyst and fill-in host. Ayman Mohyeldin’s program will expand an hour to replace the vacated slot.  Hasan has been one of MSNBC’s most outspoken supporters of Palestine. During a November 16 interview with Israeli government advisor Mark Regev, Hasan attempted to get his guest to agree that Israel has wittingly killed children.

mehdi hasan

Tuesday

Cockburn

Mehdi Hasan exposed as copycat and hypocrite

Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC has a plagiarism problem. It appears that, as with the cases of John Oliver and James Corden, Britain is not sending its best. The pundit also seems to be as much of a chameleon as Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, taking whatever position gets him ahead. Lee Fang, a reporter formerly at the Intercept, published an investigative piece on his Substack looking at Hasan’s journalistic (or, maybe, not-so-journalistic) history. "Writing" an article in 2000 taking up the cause of spanking disobedient kids, he took — almost to the letter — the text from a 1998 article in US News and World Report. A few alterations here and there to account for the difference in date, and voila!

mehdi hasan plagiarism

Tuesday

Cockburn

The meaning of Mehdi Hasan

It certainly raised eyebrows chez Cockburn, that’s for sure. A few weeks ago Peacock announced an original news program: The Mehdi Hasan Show. Peacock is NBC’s new streaming service. And who is Mehdi Hasan? Well that’s where things get really interesting. Like Cockburn, you may have noticed Mr Hasan’s cloudless upwards trajectory through the media firmament in recent years. He moved to DC in 2015, fronting news shows for Al Jazeera English, and from 2018 until earlier this year, a podcast for the Intercept. The precise moment Mehdi’s move to the big-ish leagues became inevitable almost two years ago. Watch: https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1062706401804455937 Whoa! Who is that guy?

mehdi hasan