Micah Loewinger: This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Up until January of this year, Mehdi Hasan was the host of his own MSNBC show. As his peers in Cable News invited government spokespeople to list off talking points, Hasan interrogated them like his 2021 interview with then-Israeli embassy spokesman Elad Strohmayer.

Mehdi Hasan: How would you describe these quotes from the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King, who told The New York Times on Friday that these evictions are, "Of course, part of a wider strategy of installing layers of Jews," his words, "throughout East Jerusalem." Okay, it's not apartheid. What would you call that

Micah Loewinger: On the Israel-Palestine conflict, in particular, Hasan had a knack for skewering the pageantry of diplomacy in the region.

Mehdi Hasan: Former Israeli generals and liberal Israeli journalists finally come round to seeing how badly the Palestinians have been mistreated. We have liberal Democrats from the United States, including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, to do fawning photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Micah Loewinger: In February of 2022, he covered a story largely ignored by US Cable News, the beating and death of 78-year-old Omar Assad at the hands of Israeli police.

Mehdi Hasan: The man was detained, taken to an abandoned yard, blindfolded, handcuffed, gagged, and forced to lie on his stomach until he died of a cardiac arrest.

Micah Loewinger: Hasan says his goal, in part, was to make his audience pay attention to issues beyond the borders of the US and to speak with people they don't often see on American TV.

Mehdi Hasan: The week of the Afghan withdrawal, when Kabul fell, it was August 2021, first year of Biden's presidency. It was nonstop rolling coverage across our media. It was on the front page of newspapers. It was one of the rare moments where foreign policy, foreign news really dominated American media. I happened to be guest hosting for Chris Hayes on primetime MSNBC that week. It was a really great opportunity to say, "Okay. I've got this primetime real estate. Let's do something a little bit different to everyone else. Everyone else has the usual foreign policy experts from the DC foreign policy blob on. Let's get some Afghan voices on. Let's get some people from on the ground. Let's get people with skin in the game. Let's get famous Afghan novelists. Let's get Afghan women's rights activists. Let's hear from people who are not heard from in Western media."

Micah Loewinger: How did people react to that?

Mehdi Hasan: Very positively. This is what's so interesting when you do this stuff, it's not like your ratings go down, or people call you and tell you off, or people say, this is boring. In fact, the opposite. People say, "This is a breath of fresh air."

Micah Loewinger: You grill people. You have a very confrontational style. Not always. It seems like it's deployed carefully and deliberately. Is it something you've had to develop throughout your career?

Mehdi Hasan: My parents and my sister would say it's something I've always had, even at the dinner table as a child, probably argued over who would pass the bread and et cetera. Look, I wrote a book on this as well, literally called Win Every Argument, which tells the story of how I became obsessed with arguing and debating and discussing, both, which I think is fun, but also because I think it's actually very important. I actually think it's an important part of democracy, and it's vital to a free press and a media that's willing to hold power to account.

I appreciate your kind words about the grilling, but those grillings are not easy. We have to make sure we've done our homework. When we're interviewing, for example, Mark Regev, the Prime Minister spokesman who I interviewed MSNBC, it's really important to think, "Okay, what is the game plan? What has this guest been saying elsewhere? What have they dodged answering?" Then, really honing in on that and having a set of questions and follow-ups and facts and figures that really brings to light issues that need to be brought to light. We're not just doing this for the heat. People say, "Light versus heat." I like both. I don't think we should have to choose between the two.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Let's dig into the interview that you did with Ambassador Mark Regev. This is a spokesman and advisor for Benjamin Netanyahu. You spoke to him in November. It was one of your last really big grill interviews.

Mehdi Hasan: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: He had been on so many outlets and many since CNN, BBC, Sky News, Bloomberg, but your interview felt different because of how you pushed even as he tried to wriggle out of your questions.

Mehdi Hasan: I have a lot of respect for Mark Regev, not for what he says. I think he tends to dissemble like a lot of spokespersons, but I have respect for him as a media performer. I've been watching him since I was a very young man. He was ambassador to the UK. He was a spokesman on UK media when I was coming up in the UK media in the 2000s. He goes back a long way, and I hadn't really seen anyone make any kind of dent in his armor. Apart from there's a guy called Jon Snow who retired in the UK, very famous anchor. He did a very powerful interview with Regev and one of the previous Gaza conflicts, but that aside, I'd never really seen anyone corner him.

He's very eloquent. He's very sharp. He's very savvy. He's very knowledgeable. We took this interview very seriously, and one of the things we wanted to get from that interview is the Israelis, through their PR campaign, seem to be saying things that are not true, demonstrably false statements. Let's challenge him on those.

Micah Loewinger: Two of those specifics were tweets, material that IDF spokespeople and Israeli government spokespeople had put out on Twitter and that were widely circulated. One of them was a video of an IDF spokesperson. He was in one of the hospitals in Gaza, and he walks by a calendar.

IDF spokesperson: This is a guarding list. Every terrorist has his own shift.

Mehdi Hasan: In this room. He says a guard list that begins October 7th.

Micah Loewinger: Very quickly, it was fact-checked to just be a calendar with Arabic text.

Mehdi Hasan: CNN and Nic Robertson aired that unchallenged on air. Big mistake by a media organization here. I think they corrected the record later, but it was really bad and completely wrong and false. I was able to confront Regev on that.

[video playing]

Mark Regev: I'm not sure that's true.

Mehdi Hasan: Why did your military spokesman on Monday point to a calendar in Arabic and say, "These are the names of terrorists on them? That's false. Can you accept that here and now?"

Mark Regev: I am not aware of the incident so I cannot comment on it.

Mehdi Hasan: Let's put up the image. We have the image. You have no comment--

Mark Regev: I couldn't read Arabic. It doesn't help me. I have no comment. I am not familiar with the incident.

Mehdi Hasan: Does your spokesman read Arab?

Mark Regev: I have a question, Mehdi. You're a journalist. Have you made a professional mistake ever? Not intentionally, but have you made a professional mistake?

Mehdi Hasan: Exactly, and I own up to it.

Mark Regev: Have you made a mistake? Can--

Mehdi Hasan: Can you own up to the mistake now?

Mark Regev: I've made mistakes, you've made mistakes, but there's a difference between making an honest mistake and between Hamas that deliberately exaggerates numbers to suit its propaganda purposes. There's a huge difference.

Mehdi Hasan: Sir, hold on. You said propaganda--

[end of video]

Mehdi Hasan: I felt in the moment, wow. I've never heard Mark Rege say on air that they got something wrong.

Micah Loewinger: He only said that after many follow-up questions.

Mehdi Hasan: Follow-ups are key, Micah. Follow-ups are the key. The other issue was this colleague who had put out a video from a Lebanese documentary behind the scenes claiming it was Palestinians pretending to be injured in Gaza. When I challenged him on that, he said, "Look, Alpha--" I think the guy's name is Alpha, "Alpha, is a good guy and maybe a mistake, and we'll get it fixed." Interestingly, that night, that tweet disappeared. They took it down. A small win, but a win nevertheless against Mark Regev and against the Israeli PR machine.

Micah Loewinger: In the aftermath of October 7th, you spoke with multiple Israelis with relatives who had been killed or captured. I want to talk to you about your interview with Maoz Inon.

Mehdi Hasan: That was the first show that we were able to put on air after October the 7th. There had been a bit of a gap where we were off air, and I was very keen to speak to an Israeli family member because October 7th, what happened was grotesque and appalling and very different to previous episodes in this conflict. Just the sheer volume of Israeli deaths unprecedented and Maoz was fascinating because I'm always fascinated by ordinary people who do extraordinary things. I always look in people and say, "Well, I wouldn't be able to do that."

Micah Loewinger: That's very TV news of you.

Mehdi Hasan: It is TV news of me, but it's also just who I am. I'll tell you honestly right now, if Hamas killed my parents or if the Israeli military killed my parents, I would not behave as magnanimously as some Palestinians and Israelis have in this conflict.

Micah Loewinger: I think you said that to him, right?

Mehdi Hasan: It was amazing in that moment to hear him speak in that way. I just got stunned because he's all about peace, he's all about forgiveness, he's all about not shedding more blood in order to avenge the blood of his parents.

Maoz Inon: I beg you Mehdi, cry with me. Cry with me and our tears will heal the wounds from both sides. Our tears will wash the blood from the ground and then on the pure land of the Holy Land, we'll be able to see the path to peace.

Mehdi Hasan: It's a heartbreaking story but also he's a deeply inspiring man and since that interview, by the way, Micah, he's been I think at times camped outside parliament or the Prime Minister's home, I can't remember where, but he's been doing physical protests of his own standing up and calling out other Israelis.

Micah Loewinger: I found this interview so powerful. I actually was watching it this morning and I started crying, I think, because as a Jew, it just made me remember the horrors of that day, but also how little time it felt like we had to process it before the bombing in Gaza began. Just as you mentioned, this man's moral clarity in this moment where he could have very easily just not willingly put himself in the spotlight and taken an unpopular stance against more bloodshed. In that same segment, you aired a montage of several other people like him. Family members of victims who are saying, "Do not use my loss as a justification for more war."

Mehdi Hasan: It's so important for us as journalists, to give voice to these people because the worst thing you can do as a journalist is to present communities as monoliths, to present issues as one-sided, to pretend there is no debate or discussion where there is actually plenty.

Micah Loewinger: Did you have a guiding philosophy in covering this conflict?

Mehdi Hasan: For me, something that I've always found valuable is the old line that the job of a journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Too often, we reverse that. We're too cozy with people in power. We're not tough enough. I think that was one important issue for me but more importantly, and I've said this many times, context matters. For a lot of American journalists and a lot of American news audiences, Israel-Palestine began on October the 7th. That's hugely problematic because, of course, it didn't. There is a context to what happened on October the 7th. Again, context is not causation, context is not justification, context is explanation. When you explain something, it doesn't mean you justify.

Anytime you talk about context, someone says, "Ah, you're saying what Hamas did was justified?" No, of course not. Of course, it wasn't justified, but to understand where it came from, you have to understand the occupation. You have to understand the siege of Gaza. You have to understand a right-wing Israeli government's militaristic and nationalistic mentality and ideology. You have to understand what Palestinians are going through. You have to understand America's role in all of this.

Micah Loewinger: How do you think journalists writ large, the media writ large, has covered this war now five months in?

Mehdi Hasan: Abysmally. This is one of the great crimes of our time. The International Court of Justice says this is a plausible genocide. Multiple human rights groups have documented war crimes and crimes against humanity. Micah, just for context, the week we're speaking, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has come out and said this is a situation of genocide in Gaza. The Israelis are deliberately starving the people of Gaza. He says and I quote, "Never has a civilian population got so hungry so fast so completely." That is the context of what is happening right now and when you look at what is happening and then look at the media coverage, of course, there's a mismatch, there's a failure.

Micah Loewinger: What is the failure? Give me some specifics.

Mehdi Hasan: I'll give you some big picture and some specifics. Big picture failure is we're not covering enough. We're not covering it consistently. We cover Ukraine with much more moral clarity than we cover Gaza so there's a double standard at play. In terms of specific examples, we're cowards. Journalists are scared. Scared of being attacked as anti-Israeli or antisemitic. Scared of being pressurized by bosses or lobbying groups and therefore journalists are pulling their punches. You can just see in the coverage of not just American organizations, the BBC has come in for a lot of flack for always using the passive voice.

I saw someone joking on Twitter, "Find someone who looks at you the way the BBC looks with a passive voice on Gaza." There's a meme showing how media organizations would cover other major events in the way they cover Gaza. The joke being, "If 9/11 was covered the way Gaza was covered, the headline would be Building Collapses." I read a BBC Online story the other day, Micah, where it took till the 32nd paragraph to identify the fact that the guy in the story who says he's lost 103 family members, 103 killed, it took till the 32nd paragraph of the piece, for the reporter to identify that the Israelis may have been responsible for those 103 deaths. Now, that's a complete dereliction of duty.

I also think the way we've cut editorial corners in our reporting, I don't know if you're following this week the big story out of The New York Times, where their big investigation into whether Hamas had used sexual violence as a weapon of war, huge claim, a huge story that many Israelis used to justify bombing Gaza. That turns out one of the co-authors of that story is being investigated by The Times for liking genocidal tweets. What was she doing bylining a front page globally acclaimed investigation into October the 7th?

Micah Loewinger: You are also now a regular Guardian columnist. I'm going to ask you about your first piece that you published for The Guardian last week. You argue that President Biden could stop the bombardment of Gaza right now if he wanted to.

Mehdi Hasan: I wanted to make the case that actually, there's a lot an American president can do. I started The Guardian column by telling the story of what happened in 1982 in Beirut when the Israelis were besieging Beirut, killing hundreds of Arab civilians in Beirut in an effort to try and root out and defeat the PLO, the Hamas of its time, who were also hiding in tunnels under Beirut. Ronald Reagan saw pictures of children with their limbs missing, and Ronald Reagan of all people, a president who I'm not a fan of, was horrified. Calls up Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister at the time, very right-wing, the Netanyahu of his time, and says, "Menachem, we're witnessing a holocaust here." Reagan uses the H-word and Begin gets upset. He sarcastically says to Reagan, "I think I know what a holocaust is." Reagan says, "Look, we need a ceasefire." Begin calls him back 20 minutes later and says, "It's over."

Of course, no two historical situations are alike, we're in a very different place today. October 7th has made the Israeli assault much harder to stop both within Israel and internationally, that's understandable, Joe Biden isn't Ronald Reagan, but my point in the piece was to say American presidents have huge leverage. In fact, Biden in 2021, was able to stop Netanyahu when he was doing a bombing campaign of Gaza at the time. He called him up and said, "There's no runway left it's over," and Netanyahu stopped.

Micah Loewinger: This narrative that you point out, the limits of leverage, is a storyline and a phrase that we've heard from American officials and from print outlets, I heard it on TV.

Male Speaker 9: We do have leverage over the Israelis, but I think what we're seeing is that that leverage is limited. President Biden--

Male Speaker 10: Honestly, I'm a little skeptical. I think the US has limited leverage.

Male Speaker 11: I think President Biden has leverage. It's probably limited leverage given--

Micah Loewinger: Break it down. What leverage does the US have and why, in your opinion, is it enough to pause violence?

Mehdi Hasan: Don't take my word for it, don't listen to Mehdi Hasan on American Radio, listen to Israeli military officials, I cite them in the piece. Defense Minister Gallant, who said at the start of the conflict, when Likud lawmakers were outraged that Israelis were allowing even a little bit of humanitarian aid into Gaza. What did Gallant say? He said, "The Americans give us our planes and our weaponry. What am I supposed to say to them? No?"

There's a former Israeli general who I cite in The Guardian piece, Itzhak Brik, if I remember his name correctly, who said, again, in an interview later on, I think a month later, he said, "Everyone knows we can't do anything without the Americans. We can't fight this war without America. They could turn off the tap at any time." This is what Israeli military officials are saying, that they can't do this war without American military and financial and logistical support. Why are we not using our leverage and why is Joe Biden risking re-election for Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich?

Micah Loewinger: Is anyone in the press covering the war well? Who do you think is doing a good job?

Mehdi Hasan: I do think there are some journalists who are doing good jobs. First of all, I would say journalists on the ground. A lot of the brave reporters, especially the Palestinian reporters, that's first thing. Second thing, there's been a lot of great reporters. Some of our foreign correspondents, some of the British crew at Sky News have done a great job on the ground reporting. At home, in terms of Cable world, I would do a shout-out to former Cable colleagues of mine like Ayman Mohyeldin, Ali Velshi, Chris Hayes, Joy Reid.

I don't know if you saw Joy's interview recently with a friend of mine who just came back from Gaza, Dr. Irfan Galaria, who's a plastic surgeon who volunteered in Gaza, talked about the annihilation he saw. The kids killed, shot by snipers. She did a very powerful, very human, very touching, very emotional interview with him. There are people trying to highlight human stories, trying to highlight the human suffering, but they're too few and far between, sadly.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi, thank you very much.

Mehdi Hasan: Thank you, Micah. I appreciate it.

Micah Loewinger: Mehdi Hasan is editor-in-chief and CEO of a new media company called Zeteo. He's also a columnist for The Guardian US and a former MSNBC host. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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