Mehdi Hasan, the political commentator who hosted an evening commentary show on MSNBC until its October cancellation, has announced he is leaving the center-left cable network altogether.
Hasan, a naturalized US citizen originally from the UK, was one of the more prominent Muslim-American voices on television and among the fiercest critics of Israel on the late-night set following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Hasan joined the network in 2021 after writing for the news and commentary site The Intercept and appearing as a presenter on Al Jazeera English, the Qatari-funded 24-hour news channel.
Hasan: Time to look for a new challenge
He was expected to stay on as a contributor but said in a surprise announcement at the close of his broadcast Sunday that it was time “to look for a new challenge.”
The decision by MSNBC to cancel Hasan’s show drew allegations that the network was censoring critical views on the Israel-Hamas war. Hasan received criticism in October for presenting the al-Ahli Hospital incident, in which a medical center was struck by a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as a likely Israeli airstrike. On October 19, Hasan wrote on X that the evidence ultimately suggested otherwise.
Hasan was also criticized for a heated interview with Mark Regev, in which he charged that Israel had rejected a proposed hostage deal with Hamas. Regev responded that “there was not a real option” and called the premise of the question “misinformation.” More criticism came when Hasan compared Israel’s role in Gaza to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In the week following Hamas’s October 7 Massacre, Max Tani, a writer for the website Semafor, wrote that “MSNBC has quietly taken three of its Muslim broadcasters out of the anchor’s chair…amid America’s wave of sympathy for Israeli terror victims.”
The article charged that MSNBC had declined to air an episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show on the NBC streaming platform Peacock, and that it had at the same time reversed a plan to have Ayman Mohyeldin, an Egyptian-American correspondent, fill in for the network’s 7 pm host Joy Reid, and asked Alicia Menendez to fill in for Ali Velshi, also Muslim-American, the following weekend.
“Some staff at MSBNC have been concerned by the moves,” Tani wrote, “feeling all three hosts have some of the deepest knowledge of the conflict.”
MSNBC said at the time that these moves were all unrelated to each other, and it has denied that Hasan’s cancellation was an attempt to censor the host’s views about the war. Following the show’s cancellation, MSNBC has tapped Mohyeldin, the Egyptian-American correspondent, to fill in for him, doubling his time on the air. Still, the New York Post reported that a source close to MSNBC said the network was “cutting costs like crazy” and that “the penny-pinching was a ‘good excuse’ to dump [Hasan,]” whose views the network thought was “a little too out of the mainstream.”
That newspaper also reported, however, that Hasan’s show was one of the lower-rated programs on the network and that its ratings fell further once the war broke out, as did the ratings of the network as a whole in the days following the attack. The cancellation of Hasan’s show also fits into a larger restructuring, with an increased focus on the morning rather than on primetime.