Distrust in Traditional Media with Mehdi Hasan

Does anyone completely trust the media landscape anymore? Mehdi Hasan, a broadcaster, journalist, and newly minted CEO & Editor-in-Chief of independent media company Zeteo, has a few insights that might shed light on how we've gotten to where we are, and how distrust has shaped his very specific, highly uncompromising style of reporting.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I don't trust people easily. Every other day my phone
lights up with a new scam. I get a fake text,
a fake email, a fake I'm your long distance on
can you wire me thirteen hundred dollars message? So it's
natural that I, like you, probably wake up with constant,
low grade suspicions of like everything moving around us, and

(00:21):
it doesn't stop. What spam calls. Distrust is everywhere, especially
in the traditional media. As more billionaires buy up newsrooms
and layoff journalists places like the Washington Post owned by
Jeff Bezos or the Los Angeles Times owned by another billionaire,
it feels clear that we're reading a filtered version of reality.

(00:42):
Even the New York Times, still family owned, feels harder
for me and many folks I know to read because
of its clear slant on human rights issues around the
world and here at home. But then there's Ze Teo
and Mehdi Hassan. We need brave politicians.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Let me tell my American citizen hot off and put
my British immigrant hat on and say, from an outsider perspective,
what's always depressed me is Americans have very thin skins.
American politicians in particular. This is the land of revolution,
of free speech, and yet there's a lot of snowflakes around.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Mehdi Husun is known as one of the sharpest debaters
in journalism. You may have seen him debating twenty far
right conservatives on Jubilee, which you can sort of think
of as like a reverse intellectual gangbang. Anyway, what I
respect most about Mehdi is that he doesn't just challenge
the right. He challenges everyone, the right, the left, the powerful.

(01:32):
He's a broadcaster and author, a former host on MSNBC,
and now the CEO and editor in chief of Zeteo,
an independent media company built outside the billionaire owned system.
Today I'm talking with Mehdi about the public's growing distrust
in the media, how we got here, whether we'd been
here before, and how that distrust has shaped his very specific,

(01:54):
very uncompromising style of reporting. Here we a a Hey,
I'm Cal Penn and this is Here We Go Again,
a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks
why does history keep repeating itself?

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Here?

Speaker 3 (02:28):
Hello?

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Hello? Can hear me?

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Hey?

Speaker 1 (02:31):
How are you man?

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Hey? How long time?

Speaker 2 (02:33):
How you doing?

Speaker 3 (02:33):
I'm Maddie Hausson.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
I'm the founder CEO and editor in chief of the
new media company Zeteo. I'm a columnist for The Guardian
and I used to host a show on MSNBC.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
I'm especially excited to talk to you about the public's
distrust in the media, and I feel like for the audience,
I wanted to just kind of outline a very quick
data set from Pure Research Center. The number of American
adults who say they have a lot of or some
trust in the information that they get from national news
organization in twenty sixteen was seventy six percent. By March

(03:04):
of twenty twenty five, it was sixty seven percent, and
as of October of twenty twenty five, it was down
to fifty six percent. As somebody who I assume has
kind of lived a lot of this from the inside,
based on so much of your fantastic reporting, what's your
sense of why there's such a growing mistrust towards the
mainstream media right now?

Speaker 2 (03:25):
It's a great question, It's a big question. I mean,
the short answer is Trump. That's the short answer. The
longer term answer, because it's a global problem, not just
an American problem, is that the media has not been
able to meet the public where they.

Speaker 3 (03:38):
Are in many ways.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
There's been a kind of slowness to adapt to the
way the world has changed, and there's been some big
moments in modern history in our lifetimes that have led
to genuine collapses of trust in the media and matterfactured ones.
I'm in this weird space cal where I've both been
mainstream media and i'm independent media. I'm both some one

(04:00):
who wants to defend the media from fake right wing attacks,
but as also on the left and understands the left
critique of corporate control.

Speaker 3 (04:07):
Media as well.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
For the last two and a half years, all I've
heard from friends of mine and family of mine is,
look at Gaza. Look at the media's coverage of Gaza.
It's been horrendously bad. I can't defend the media's coverage
of Gaza. One of the reasons I set up my
own media companies a day is because I was so
frustrated with the mainstream.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Media's coverage of Gaza.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
And if you go back twenty years, I'm old enough,
I've got the gray hairs. If you go back to
two thousand and three Iraq War, in my lifetime, that
was the big collapse in trust. Early on, I was
in my early twenties, I would just join the media.
I was a young journalist, a young researcher in TV
in the UK. I marched against the Iraq war in
February two thousand and three. They went to war in March.
We know the media's role from the BBC in the

(04:45):
UK and the Sun newspaper saying Saddam is forty five
minutes away from using WMDs, to the New York Times
splashing Dick Cheney and Condolleza's nonsense about nuclear mushroom clouds
on the front page. We know the media disgraced itself
in two thousand and three. I think if you do
look at the polling you mentioned some of the polling,
you will see that some of that collapse of trust,
if you go look at the chance does start in

(05:07):
two thousand and three, and then you get a financial
collapse in two thousand and eight, you have migrant crisis
in twenty fifteen, you have COVID in twenty twenty, and
of course you have Trump in the background for the
last decade in citing his own particular corner of the
political spectrum against the media. So it's a kind of
mix of forces, both political technological partisan which have led
to this moment now where people across the board and

(05:29):
unless we haven't even got into Epstein, which right now
is every normy. I know, every friend of mine who
isn't very political is talking about Epstein and talking about
media cover up.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Enjoyed that you call your slightly less engaged friends normies,
and I'm going to have to start using that normally.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
I'm abnormal, right, I live this shit. And then I
have actual people in my life who keep me grounded
and say, hey, we have no idea what you're talking about,
but this Epstein thing that we want to talk about.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, the way that you kind of outline those touch
points too were roughly the same age. And I also
remember protesting against the Iraq War. I remember I feel
like in those days it was only Democracy Now and
the Guardian that had any actual reporting on what was
happening in.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
Yeah, the media.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
That was the moment where people are like, wow, they
just lied to us. They just took the administration's claims,
Bush and Blair's claims and passed it off as fact.
And the right have their own version of that, which
is COVID. I don't agree with it, but there's people
on the right who believe that the media disgraced itself
during the pandemic and lied to us about vaccines and
masks and social distancing.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
So this phrase mainstream media, how do you like, well,
how do you define it? But what exactly qualifies mainstream
media versus kind of what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
That's a great question. I don't think there is a
right answer. What was it the Supreme Court said about
pawn You know, when you see it, I feel like
I feel.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Like that's the MSM.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Like we kind of I can't give you an exact definition,
but we all kind of know. It's the BBC, it's
the CNN, it's the CBS News, it's the New York Times,
it's the New It's the Times of London. It's the Lamonde,
you know, it's it's in many ways Al Jazeera. It
plays its own role globally. But it is this idea
of like traditional mainstream broadcasters, traditional mainstream newspapers, this are

(07:08):
the people who've been around. It's also called the legacy media.
Cal You hear that phrase a lot as well, this
idea that they've been around for a long time.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
They are mainstream.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Media simply by virtue of having existed for a long time.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Right.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
For example, you could argue, like Politico is an interesting one,
which is kind of started off as a newspaper magazine
in DC.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Now is a very kind of huge operation.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Most people say that's mainstream media, but it started in
a kind of upstartish way. But it's been around for
a while. Is it because of the politics of these outlets?
I think that plays a role. There's a sense of like,
is the mainstream media also establishment media? So we have
all these different kind of euphemisms for kind of what
is the same thing, which is this idea of kind
of big, established, not shaking too many things up media outlets,

(07:52):
some of them subscribe to kind of impartiality. You know
that the BBC would say we are mainstream media, we're
not partiesan we're in and the New York Times would
claim that and I would laugh in its face. So
it's hard to define, but I think most people kind
of know what it is. I think nobody would look
at you know, huff Posts is a good example. I've
worked at huff Post. I worked there for two years
in the UK, and huff Post started off as a

(08:15):
kind of blog ariana Huffington, then it got bought by AOL.
Then it got bought by Verizon, so big corporations bought it.
Now it's kind of mainstream, but it's still huff Post.
Is that mainstream media? I'm not sure all the answer
to that.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
That's an interesting answer, especially bumping up on the right
wing mainstream media analysis on COVID or their criticism of that.
How do you tell if media criticism is being done
in good faith? To begin with, that's.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
A great question. Well, I think so.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
I wrote a book about debating and persuading caw. One
of the things I said is I love having arguments.
I love to debate. I'll debate most people, but I
won't debate anyone. I don't debate people who don't debate
in good faith.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
It's just a waste of time.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
And that means that these days I'm limited in who
I can debate because there's not many good faith actors around.
The entire right side of the American political spectrum is
been taken over by kind of grifters and loons and
conspiracy theorists and naked partisans, which makes it very difficult
to say how to have a good faith conversation about
this or that. I mean, we're recording this show right now,
where one of the big stories recently has been AOC

(09:14):
in Munich. And that's a classic example. I did Piers
Morgan's show recently and he was bashing AOC. Oh the
liberal media they cover for AOC. She gets such a
bad answer in Taiwan. She paused for twenty seconds, she
ummed an odd And there's a classic example where the
entire kind of media did the exact opposite. The quote
unquote liberal media just took talking points from the right.
And this is one of the problems with our quote
unquote liberal media. It's not very liberal. It laundes right

(09:37):
wing talking points all the time. The right wingers worked
out how to game the rest. They've worked out how
to kind of get their their their talking points into
cable news discussion panels and late night headlines. And there's
a class example where people are not arguing with faith.
There's no scenario which I will ever take a right
winger telling me about AOC's answer being not very smart
when you support Donald Trump. If you support Donald Trump,

(09:58):
by definition, I can't take you seriously. You want to
judge the mental or intellectual competence of any other politician.
Ha ha ha. You want to talk to me about AOC.
Have you seen what your guys says? So I think
it's all about track records. Cal For me, when I
look at people good faith act as I immediately and
you know, people know me as the guy who brings receipts.
I'm obsessed with, like, what did someone say? When did
they say? Have they disowned the remark? Have they apologized

(10:18):
for it? Have they moved on?

Speaker 3 (10:20):
You know, I do.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Interviews with people and I bring up stuff they said
from five, ten, fifteen years ago. People do it to
me too, and you know, I say, well, I disowned that.
I no longer believe that we will change. But I
think when it comes to people who say, for example,
you know, oh, the media, the media did this or that.
If there's someone who spent their entire life critique in
the media, this is not a good faith critique, right,
you're just finding You're just fine. It's confirmation bias. You're

(10:41):
on the right, You're looking for an excuse to bash
the liberal media. And you say, aha, this is it.
This is further evidence to prove my point. And I
think that is a problem. I also think, you know,
we live in a very very partisan media climate. So
you have Fox for example, So Fox is like the
media version of Trump.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
If you are someone who goes on Fox, defect Fox
has hosted shows on Fox. I can't take you seriously
on anything else you say. Because Fox is on a
news channel, it's a propaganda channel.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
I don't call it Fox. I call it Fox because
it's not a news network.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
So I think you've got to look at where are
people coming from and one of their agendas to work
out whether people are engaging in good or bad faith.
I would like to think that I engage in media
critiques in good faith because i've so.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
For example, when I launched.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
To Teo cal it was very easy for me to
have said, you know what, I worked in TV news
in the UK and the US. It's all corrupt, it's
all a conspiracy, it's all a lie.

Speaker 3 (11:33):
And he comes subscribed to the tale I did not
do that. Tucker Carson did that. Tel Carson left Fox.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
This is a guy who worked for CNN, Fox, MSNBC,
worked in all mainstream outlets, and then he goes independent
through no choice of his own, and he goes Oh,
I think his land was the mainstream media is dead
join us, right.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
I don't think it is dead. I don't want to
lie to people. Right.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
There are many good things the mainstream media still does
that ZETEO does not want to do and cannot do.
Like what So for example, the investment that a CNN
or a BBC makes in foreign news coverage, right, that's
still valuable.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Right.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
There's still great reporters out there in war zones, right
covering Soudan or Ukraine or wherever it is, sadly not Gaza,
but there are people doing great coverage abroad. I don't
want to see that gone. I don't want to see
those people laid off. I was sad when the Washington
Boast recently fired three hundred people in one day. I
didn't go, hey, good for ZETEO, even though financially probably
is good for the TAO. Lots of people quitting the

(12:25):
Washington Boats coming to subscribe today is great. But as
someone who has been part of these institutions from the inside,
I try and take a nuanced position and say, look,
there's a lot about the Washington Boats I do not like,
but that doesn't mean I want to burn it all down.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
I hear what you're saying on Fox News. I'm curious
how you do you distinguish between people who go on
Fox News, for example, just fur their hot take analysis
thing versus like, I'm just trying to think they're a
small handful of people in the center or even center
left who have gone out like I don't know if
he still does it, but Pete Buddhaget used to go

(12:58):
on this transportation the tractory was quite good at it.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
Yeah, so people digit and Bernie Sanders do it, both
of them, and they do it well. And I've had
this argument with people on the left. I mean, it's
not a hill I'm going to die on. I see
the other side. But my position is you shouldn't go
on Fox because you're just legitimizing them. And the counter
argument is they don't need you to legitimize them. They're
the biggest network, they have a huge audience, and if
we go on that channel, we as progressives can get
through to an audience who never hear progressive views. The

(13:23):
problem with that is twofold number one, you're basically are
legitimizing Fox. Fox literally do go to advertisers and say, see,
we're not a part of zan channel. We have Bernie
on the channel, and they use it to make money.
I don't think we should help Fox make money. It's
the most malevolent force in our politics in our lifetime.
And I'm including Elon Musk, Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg's meta
in that. I think most roads in America, when you

(13:45):
talk about problems in our public life, most roads lead
back to Fox. So I don't think you should do
a number two. You know, people go on Fox, they say, oh,
Bernie did a great town hall and he got through
the Fox viewers. Yeah, he got through the Fox viewers
from seven to eight pm on a Tuesday night. What
about the the other twenty three hours of the day
and every other day of the week where they simply
undermined everything he said and did. I mean this is

(14:06):
a problem. It's I don't think you're actually changing hearts
and minds. Maybe a few people, but I think you're
doing more damage by legitimizing these people. I think we
should be calling out the bad faith actors. I think
people on the left should be declaring a rhetorical war
on the media misinformation on the right, because actually, you know,
Steve Bannon once said cal he said, hate to quote
Steve Bannon, he said, our real enemy is not the

(14:28):
Democratic Party, it's the media. And that is the rights approach,
and I think it's correct in many ways. I think
that should be the left approach. It should be you
know what, the Republican body are just a front group.
The real issue is the real people are Elon Musk,
The real people are Mark Zuckerberg, The real people are
Rupert Murdoch. The real people are these pundits pushing bile
and hate online. They are the people who do much
more damage than any random elected member of Congress on

(14:50):
the Republican side.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Where do you get your news?

Speaker 3 (14:53):
I'm gonna have to.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Go take a shower after this, But it's online. It's
on social media. I hate that I have to say that,
and I hate to hypocrite.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
I thought you were just going to floss that you
have reporters of your own now and so you don't
need any other.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, no, and I do, Thank god, we do have
an excellent reporting team now. No, I'm someone who is
addicted to social media. Sadly, it is a problem. If
I was a you know, social media anonymous, I would say,
my name is Mandy hasse and I am addicted social media.
I am addicted to Twitter specifically, which really kills me
because I hate Elon Musk. But my position is I
was on Twitter, you know, before he bought it, and

(15:25):
I can.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Rationalize it for you, but it's just an addiction.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
I'm skilled enough to make wonderful arguments in favor of
why I'm on Twitter, but fundamentally I can't really justify
It's just I am there and look as a source.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Of breaking news.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
It's still full of horrible misinformation and racism, but it
is places where stuff happens fast. It is still a
place where world leaders are kind of making pronouncements. Joe
Biden announced he was quitting the presidency on Twitter. I
wish he hadn't done that, but he did, and as
a journalist, I was there to see that live on
that Sunday afternoon and react. I do try and sign
up for all the morning newsletters. Another shameless Plugs today

(15:58):
who just launched a morning newsletter called First Draft from.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
A Progressive perspective.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
But you know all the CNN and Axios and all
of those morning news. As a politics junkie, it's a
good way to just see what is happening?

Speaker 3 (16:09):
What are people saying?

Speaker 2 (16:10):
But I do try and have a diverse To go
back to your question, ever since I was a university student.
I went to college in nineteen ninety seven and I
used to go to the Junior Common Room, the JCR
as it was called in my college, where you know,
lots of people were watching TV and playing pool and arcades,
and I was the nerd. Well, I also played arcades,
but I was a nerd who was sitting with the
pile of newspapers, like wow, free newspapers, Like paid for

(16:31):
every newspaper in those days. I don't know if that's
still the case in British universities with budget cuts, but yeah,
the Guardian, you're the Telegraph, you at the times, you're
the mail. I would read them, all right. I was
even more on the left nd probably than I am now,
but I would read everything. I would read the Telegraph
comment page, I would read mail op eds because I
wanted to see what everyone was saying. And you know,
I say this in my book, you can't know your
own argument until you know the other side of the argument.

(16:52):
So I've always been pro exposing yourself to a diverse
set of news sources, but these days I had the
caveat that you need to have the media literacy to
understand when you're being lied to or when you're being spun.
Too many young people today don't know how to distinguish
between quote mainstream media and independent media, between quote real
news and fake news. And I wish we talked kids

(17:14):
a lot more about discernment and discrimination when they were
in school.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
This comes up sometimes. I do college lectures that I
imagine are mostly different than the ones that you do,
but the question about media transparency has come up a
few times, especially after I hosted The Daily Show for
a couple of weeks back in twenty twenty three. And
the only thing I can think to say to them,
which this is very validating for me. And I'm now

(17:39):
remembering analog because I still love an analog newspaper. But
the thing that they have today that we didn't have,
like when you know democracy. Now, obviously I could listen
to on the radio in college, but if I wanted
in la if I wanted a copy of the Guardian,
it was there was nothing online. It was a physical
copy of the Guardian that was at least six days
old that I would have to get at a civic

(18:00):
news stand next to UCLA. And so the idea that
today you can just kind of you can read about
the same issue from ten different news sources online. I
will I hadn't thought about the Twitter of that because
I got rid of my Twitter a few years ago.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
But of course young people are not on Twitter right
or they're on TikTok. That's what they're saying. That's where
they're getting the majority the needs form, which is kind
of worrying because there's a lot of bullshit on TikTok.
And of course now it's partly owned by the Allison family,
which is pro Trump and pro election Deval and pro liquid.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
I want to talk a little bit about your trajectory
to starting Zatteo, which is fantastic, And I will also
say subscribe if you're not a subscriber and you're listening
to this. So twenty twenty one you have the Mehdi
Hussun Show which begin airing as part of the weekend
lineup on MSNBC Sundays.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
I think what Sunday Evenings.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yes, twenty twenty three, the show was canceled. Can you
talk about what happened? And then how you launched Zateo
from there, so.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
I joined MSNBC. Phil Griffin hired me in twenty twenty.
I was working at the Intercept and doing a show
for out as Here English. I never thought US Cable
News would ever hire me because of my style, because
of my politics, but you know, Phil took a risk
and hired me, and you know I would argue I
made a success of it. A lot of people noticed
what we were doing. I had a show on the
streaming channel on Peacock, and I had a show on

(19:20):
Sunday nights, which wasn't a great time slot, kind of
a graveyard slot. But we made a lot of noise.
We punched above our weight, we did. You know, some
of our stuff got more views online in particular than
even some of the primetime shows on MSBC.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
So we were very proud of what we did.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Small team, punching above our weight, making a lot of news,
making a lot of noise. And I did that for
nearly three years, and it was a great three years,
possibly the best three years of my career. And then
you know, in November twenty twenty three, about a month
after October seventh, I actually I went to do the
daily Show with Michelle Wolf was guest hosting, and I
went on the Daily Show that night in New York

(19:53):
and I drove back late that night and early the
next morning I got a call saying, well, we're canceling
your shows. These are business re and would love you
to stay on as a guest anchor and on a
political analyst.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
And I knew that day.

Speaker 2 (20:05):
Even though I was super upset at the time, as
you know, normal thing to react, I wasn't happy to
lose my shows, although in hindsight, probably the best thing
that ever happened to me career was But on the
day I was a upset, but b I kind of
knew that day instantly. I remember going with my wife
to a cafe near the house. I just wanted to
switch off our phones because we were getting bombarded with
phone calls and people were tweeting about it, members of Congress,

(20:27):
et cetera. And I just said to her that day,
I have to leave because there was no way I could.
It's just not me to be a kind of guy
on the bench. And also I knew that twenty twenty
four was going to be one of the biggest news
years ever. We're in the middle of a genocide in Gaza.
There's a fascist about to win an election. I can't
be silent, you know. Unfortunately I have very few skills

(20:47):
in life. Running my mouth is one of them. And
I couldn't just be kind of the guy who's you know,
sitting in for Chris Hayes once every few weeks, as
much as I love Chris. So I managed to negotiate
away out of my cable contract, which is quite hard
to do for if you know, cable contracts at MSBC
were good enough to let me leave early, and I
launched a tea straight away. I mean four people. I
was just telling a friend earlier today. I launched a

(21:10):
here with four people in the middle of Ramadan, and
we're talking now in the middle of Ramadan as well,
two years ago, and it was insane to launch a
media company from scratch. People tried to laugh at off,
Oh you're doing a subject, and I said, no, I
want to launch an actual media company, all singing, all dancing,
with staff, with producers, with contributors from around the world,
have a global presence, and we pulled it off. You know,

(21:31):
I didn't want to do the Tucker Carlson Network. I
could have just done the mayde Huston Show on YouTube.
And respect to people who've done that. By the way,
some of my very close friends ex colleagues of Cable,
like Joey Read and Jimmy Costa have done exactly that
and have been very successful, and I urge you to
support them as well. But I wanted to build something
beyond myself that endures. I was ambitious, maybe over ambitious,
and I thought, you know what, I'm looking at Ben

(21:51):
Shapiro in the Daily Wire, and I'm looking at Barry
Weiss back then with the Free Press, and I'm looking
at all these right wing sites, and why is no
one in the progressive space trying to set something up
that is broad, that does command support across the spectrum,
that can make money, that isn't just a nonprofit or
a you know, a charity. And that's what I wanted

(22:12):
to do. And people said to me, now, now there's
not the money for it, and people aren't going to subscribe.
And you know, thankfully, we've proved them wrong. We're two
years in, we have six hundred thousand subscribers.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
On our email newsletter. We are making money.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
We have one point six million subscribers to our YouTube channel.
We've won multiple awards for our podcast. We've had documentaries
nominated for awards. We have amazing reporters like Swin Soup
Sang and prem Taker reporting on politics. We have contributors
from all over the world, Gretituneberg, Barsam Yusev, Fatima Bhuto,
Naomi Klein Owen Jones. So we're very proud of what
we've built, and I think that's because the demand was there.

(22:47):
People wanted this. To go back to your original question,
people were fed up with the media. There's a great
video we put out of some of our subscribers who
turned up to a live event we did in DC
last year, and one of them says, I cancel my
New Time subscription the minutes to Day was launch because
I've why not give the money to the TAO. These
are people who would frustrated not just with the Times
coverage of Trump and politics, but of course with the
Times coverage of Gaza. You know, and I say this

(23:09):
very uncynically, we were able to take advantage of just
as a matter of fact, we said we're going to
talk more bluntly about issues of fascism and racism and
genocide and people seem to want that.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one
who jumped from The Times to Zato for many of
those same reason. How have you found mainstream Democrats in
terms of how accessible they make themselves to you and
your team, whether they come on to your shows, the
podcast version, or all that. And the reason I'm asking
this is that for at least four years, probably longer,

(23:39):
because I worked in the Obama White House and that
was the last White House that had a youth outreach person,
and thankfully there were two more before Trump and and
Biden never had one either, So we still get these
questions of like, hey, what can the Democrats do to
reach young people? It's questions like who should be our
next Joe Rogan on the left, and like the left

(23:59):
doesn't fucking needed Joe Rogan.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
We need braver politicians, just separately to anything else, right,
I mean American policy. I say this, Let me take
my American citizen had off and put my British immigrant
hat on and say, from an outsider perspective, what's always
depressed me is Americans have very thin skins. American politicians
in particular, this is the land of revolution, of free speech,
and yet there's a lot of snowflakes around. And when
I was at MSNBC, that was always a challenge too.

(24:23):
Are people going to come on the show? Are Republicans
going to come on the show? Republicans tend not to
come on MSNBC, and I had a policy of not
having election denials on the show, which means ninety five
percent of the GOP couldn't come on.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
But I remember I managed to have a fight with.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Dan Crenshaw, the Texas Republican, on Twitter, and it turned
into he came on the show and it went mad.
Vira was one of the biggest interviews we did at
the time.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
He came on.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Credit to him, I don't agree with him, but at
least he came on took my questions. We had a
good half hour intense debate on Live TV about immigration
and Trump's immigration policy at the time, and we had
Democrats who came on. Ron Klain from the White House
came on many times, enjoyed a good fight. Jensaki prior
to actually jumping ship to MSNBC when she was White
House pressed the she took my question. I remember people
on Twitter getting mad like resistance Twitter like blew on

(25:05):
on or whatever you want to call the kind of
hardcore Democrats online. They were like, how dare you speak
to Jensaki like that? She is the White House Press Secretary.
And Jen had to say, no, it was a good
interview made, should ask tough questions. But the problem is
a lot of Democrats are now copying Republicans who you know,
Republicans for years have just gone on Fox right. They
have a safe space, you know, why not just go
get softball questions from Sean Hanna Toy or whoever it

(25:28):
is Fox and Friends, And now Democrats are doing that
a lot one of the downsides Again, let me try
and be a nuanced independent media is great.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
I'm in the independent media space.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
I support all my fellow you know, content creators, journalists
doing their thing. My worry is, though the independent media
on the left turns into some kind of echo chamber
for the Democratic Party where it just becomes a space
where Democrats can go get softball questions so they can
avoid tough questions on the mainstream media. And I don't
want that to happen. Zeiteo has tried to avoid that.
My show May the Unfiltered is still a place where

(25:56):
I do the same tough interviews I did when I
was at MSNBC. I do think it is Democrats looking
around and saying, shit, we need to go where the
people are, and the people are not meet the press.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Who are the guests you've had who have been really
good at process? And I a politician specifically at explaining process.
And I'll tell you the reason I'm asking this is
my first guest on the first episode of the Daily
Show that I guest hosted was President Biden and called
in obviously a bunch of favors to get him on there.
My goal in interviewing him, I thought to myself, well,
I'm not a journalist, I'm a comedy guy. So I

(26:26):
think what would be interesting is if I ask him
questions that we'll explain process to younger viewers. And most
of that was supposed to focus on climate because of
the legislation that he got in and a lot of
that was driven by thirty years of youth advocacy. Whatever.
When I saw the interview, and especially post October seventh,
and then especially after he stepped down from reelection and

(26:47):
all that, I realized, oh, this was such a missed
opportunity for me to be at least a little bit
combative on things, and I just viewed it as an
either or I was like, I only have one segment.
I don't know how to do this. It's either I'm
combative or I focus on process. I don't think that's
the case now.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
But cal isn't it funny that you're having that reflection,
self reflection, self criticism about a comedy show? Is he
Where the fuck are the Sunday Show? Where are our
Sunday Show hosts? Are they having these discussions? Are the
people who sat down with Donald Trump and did shitty interviews?
I all of almost all of them? Donald Trump just
sat down with someone the other day and it was
an awful You know that's it. Tom Lamas of NBC

(27:26):
News horrifically bad interview, Nora o'donald of CBS, horrifically bad
interview Trump.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Do they do they go?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Do they lie in bed at night thinking why didn't
ask a follow up question when he just lied to
my face? I don't know, because you're showing more self
reflection for the fucking Daily Show than our mainstream media
anchors are about their shitty interviews with the world's greatest liar,
so I think in general, the American media as a whole,
as I said earlier, has a problem with combative India.
I think one of the reasons I thrived in this country,

(27:53):
one of the reasons I moved here ten years ago,
managed to make a success of a career from scratch,
when no one knew who I was. I moved here
to work for Al Jazeera, knew who I was. No
one was watching out and jen Era is because of
my style of interviews. I think America there's enough people
to go we want this, Why can't we have this?
I and I'm going to say something super megalomaniacal, egomaniacal, narcissistic,
whatever you want to call it. I do think thanks
to people like me and Jonathan Swan, for example, when

(28:16):
he was an axios, I do think we've had an effect.
I do think interviews have got a little bit tougher
in recent years. I think American interviewers have slightly raised
their game, but not enough.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
But we need more of that.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
We need more interviewers willing to just really ask tough
followup questions. The public want it, cal the viewers want it.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
I mean, that's clear from the success of what you've
built and for many unfiltered are there things that worry
you about having unfiltered conversations?

Speaker 3 (28:47):
I mean the big one is access, right.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
I mean people criticize the media in terms of access journalism.
People say, you know, if if a Sunday show does
a tough interview with Lindsay Graham, he'll never come back,
and they want Lindsay Graham regularly on the show, and there's.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
There's a look, that's a fair point. I get it.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
I'm not denying that's a real issue. Access is an issue.
If you're a journalist. You do want to be able
to talk to politicians on and off the record. You
do want to be able to have repeat interviews. I
never took that stance, right. I'm maybe lucky in the
sense that my position always was, if this is the
last interview I do with mister X, oh well, but
I'm still going to do what I have to do.
I'm not going to pull my punches because I need
mister X to come back. When I joined MSMC, one

(29:23):
of the first big interviews I did that went mad
viral was John Bolton. I couldn't believe that John Bolton
agreed to do an interview this as I said, I
marched against Irart War in February two thousand and three.
I've waited twenty years for this moment. I'm sitting across
John Bolton's remote. I'm in my studio. I'm battering him.
He's getting very uncomfortable. He keeps saying the time's up.
I gotta go, My time's out. When a politician says
though they need to leave that, you know they're in trouble.

(29:44):
And so no, no, We've still got five moments. We
said twenty minutes and that interview. When that interview was over,
I knew that John Bolton will never sit down with
me for another interview ever again. And I'm okay with that, right.
So that's a problem. So when you ask about May
the Unfiltered, obviously I'm launching in you meat company. I
have a studio in DC. We have a weekly show.
I want good guests. But you know, oh, if I'm

(30:05):
too tough on Chris Murphy, will he not come back?
If I'm too tough on AOC, will she not come back?
And I think that's obviously always. I'm not gonna lie
and say that's not there in the back of my mind,
but I try and put it to one side and
do what I have to do in the moment. And
the good thing is again not good as it should be.
But politicans are improving a bit. They are more willing

(30:25):
to take a little bit.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
Of a tougher question.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Now in this podcast, independent journalist YouTuber work, I.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
Want to ask you about the twenty twenty four election,
and then after that kind of look towards the future,
but for context for our listeners. So there's a faction
on the left right, and I would put myself very
much in this category at the time who felt that
we couldn't support Harris because of the Biden administration's role
in Gaza. But I also felt like that was relatively
easy for me to do because I live and vote

(30:58):
in New York City and there was like zero risks
than New York State was gonna swing towards Trump. And
so at the time, I felt, oh, Biden and Harris
are the same as Trump on human rights in the
Middle East, on Gaza. The only difference to me at
the time was that Harris would yell at young people
for pointing it out and Trump would just yell at everyone.
And I felt like your take counter to mine. Your

(31:19):
take on this was far more nuanced. You obviously were
deeply critical of Biden and Harris on Gaza, but you
were also discussing the realities of what a Trump win
would mean for Gaza. What went into your analysis on
this and why was it important for you to lay
that out, and also what was the like, what kind
of pushback did you get from?

Speaker 2 (31:38):
Well, let's start with the pushback because it relates to
the question you just asked, which is a kind of
here I am.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
I'm no longer just a journalist.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
I'm a small business owner, right, I'm a capitalist trying
to make a profit reluctantly and in the independent world. Again,
one of the things a lot of independent journalists won't
tell you. And I'm gonna trying to be honest and nuanced.
A lot of independentalists wil say, oh, I'm no longer
in the corporate media. I no longer have to worry
about advertisers, which is true. I have subscribers who fund me,
so I'm independent. So I'm completely independent in a way

(32:07):
that an MSNBC or CNN anchor is not. That's not
fully true. I'll tell you why softully true, because you're
always tried about your subscribers. Right, those of us who
run a media business on substack, for example, are permanently
opening a laptop every day and going to the back
end every substackle. If they deny this, they're lying to you.
Cal every day they're looking at the numbers. They look

(32:28):
at the back end. They're going to the back end
of the website and seeing how many people subscribe today,
how many people cancel today, how many people knew their
subscription today. Right, That is constantly there, And there is
a danger. Right when you are in a political niche
and you have a particular group of subscribers who are
coming to you for a particular take and angle or ideology,
there is a danger of audience capture. There is a
sense that I need to tell them what they want

(32:49):
to hear. If I tell them something different to what
the party line is, they're just going to reject me
and go somewhere else. There's so much choice, they can
go to the other guy who will tell them what
they want to hear. So that was a real problem
for me for my team in twenty twenty four, where
for us it was actually very difficult because unlike a
lot of other lefty outlets, we had a split right
because of my MSNBC days and because of my very

(33:11):
strong anti Trump stans. I have a lot of mainstream
liberal subscribers. I have a lot of kind of ex
MSNBC folks, kind of white middle class liberals, normy Democrats
who hate Trump but loved my interview with Vivet Ramaswami.
And you know, like my journalism on the Republican Party,
they don't care so much about Gaza. It's not a
priority for them. Then there's a group of people who

(33:32):
are either on the left or in the Muslim Arab
American communities who are big fans of mine and come
to SATEO because we do unflinching coverage of the genocide
in Gaza, and obviously Harrison Biden are complicit in that genocide.
And you have this sense where there were days cow
where I would do a monologue trying to navigate this space,
and the next day I would look at the back

(33:53):
end and you get comments from people unsubscribing. I swear
to god, there were days where it was back to
back where one subscriber would say, well, maybe's just a
democratic party stooge pushing the Harris line.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
I didn't come here for this. I'm canceling my subscription.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
And the next commenter was, man, he's just a far
left nutcase who doesn't understand the real threat is Trump.
But we need to get behind Harris. I'm canceling my subscription,
and literally, I'd be like, you cannot please both of
these people at the same time, and therefore don't bother
trying to please them. Just speak the truth right and
the people who do understand nuance will stay for it,
and the vast Majura subscribers did stay for it. Now

(34:24):
I do live events. Everywhere college campus is a TAYE event.
There's always someone in the audience over the last year
and a half who said, do you regret supporting Harris?
And I have to point out I didn't support Harris.
I went out of my way not to endorse Harris.
What I did say was that Trump would be worse
than Harris. Now each to our own to make up
their choice of who they want to vote for. I
went out of my way not to tell people how
to vote. What I did want to do is lay

(34:46):
out the reality of what was on offer. What I
was worried about was too many other journalists' opinion formers
YouTubers were simplifying what wasn't simple, right, because it wasn't
simple enough to say, well, they're both as bad as
each other, and the genocid will continue regardless.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Therefore it doesn't matter who I vote for.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Actually, as we've discovered in the last eighteen months, it
was a lot more complicated than that, and even Gaza
was a lot more complicated than that. Trump comes in
and does a cease far on his first day, and
everyone starts piling it on me, say, but do you
were wrong? Trump did what Biden and Harris couldn't do.
That sees Far fell apart. We then had the worst
starvation that we've seen since the start of this genocide.
That was on Trump's watch. We saw him endorsing ethnic cleansing.

(35:23):
So it was a complicated time people. It was a
very I'm also you know, I'm Muslim, I'm in the
Muslim American community. You know, I know Muslim families that
were torn apart from this, I know Muslim friendships that
were destroyed over this. It was a very divisive time
in the community because the choice was such a difficult
choice was a horrible choice to choose between a government

(35:44):
that was complicit and a genocide and a fascist who
was going to come in and crack down on any
kind of peaceful protest against that genocide. And you know,
since then, you know, I've gone back and forth about
what was the right way. I interviewed Manmud Khalil Cow
recently and I said to him, you know, Manwood, you
said that there's no difference between By and Trump on
Garz and he said yes, And I said, I probably
agree with you on that. Do you agree that you

(36:05):
would have been arrested under Biden? And he said, now,
of course not. Even Meno'd agreed that. When it comes
to certain domestic policies or the ability to protest against
what's happening.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
In Gaza, that's much worse.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Now you have an administration that's locking up a young
Turkish student because she wrote an op ed in her
newspaper saying we should divest from Israel. They grabbed her
off the street, eight masked men and put her in
a prison camp for months. Right, no matter what you
think of Biden and Harris, I'm very critical of Biden
and Harris. That didn't happen under Biden Harrison wouldn't have
happened under a president Harris. So it was a horrible time,
and the media climate made it much worse because you

(36:36):
had all these hot take merchants doing one or the
other takes, which was, oh, look at these dumb leftists,
they don't understand.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
They're going to let Trump win.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
And then you had all these you know, leftists saying, well,
it doesn't matter who you vote for. The roads a
bad as each other, which is not true either. So
Zadeo tried to navigate through that. I think we just
about survived it, but it was a very tough time
for us.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
I'll bring it back to whether things will get worse
or better on the media front. As we wrap up
the first week of February, the Jeff Bezos owned Washington
Post announced it was laying off a third of its staff.
So you have you know, legacy media like you refer
to you of shrinking of institutions on that magnitude, Is

(37:17):
that the beginning of the end for these types of institutions.
I mean it's been for years and years. Obviously, The
New York Times gets thinner and thinner and thinner. Where
do we go from here, and then what's the role
of independent journalism like your company in leading into the future.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
So it's clearly getting worse for mainstream media, and that's
bad for democracy. I would argue the Washingtons, you know,
lost its book section and sports sections and international affairs.
That's bad for the discourse. That's bad for society, that's
bad for the town.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Square if we have such a thing. I'm not celebrating that.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
As critical as I am of the Washington bost coverage
of many stories that I care about, including but not
limited to Gaza. So it's getting bad, it's getting worse.
I'm not one of these people who says mainstream media
is dead, as I mentioned earlier. I mean, I worked
at MSNBC for three years. Nobody on my team, almost
nobody on my team. I had a bunch of producers
are in their twenties. None of them have cable.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
They were working at.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Cable company, but they don't have cable at home, right,
And that's obviously not surprising to most young people who
don't have cable. But there's still enough old people still
watching cable to make it relevant. There's still enough powerful
people watching cable and appearing on cable to make it relevant.
So you know, at some point, you know, if you
look at a chart of like independent media or online
media versus cable media, there's going to be that crossing

(38:32):
over point. Every boss, every management person in these networks
knows that and are having fevered meetings about it right
now as we speak.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
But I'm not sure we're at that moment yet.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
I think there's been a, you know, Mark Twain style,
a lot of predictions about the death of mainstream media
which haven't quite yet panned out. New York Times is
still a force to be reckoned with it's subscriptions of
kind of skyrocketed in the Trump era.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
So I do think inevitably they are going to die out.

Speaker 2 (38:55):
Just technology is going to kill them separate anything else,
but not right now and in the short term. And
they still have a lot of influence and impact. That's
true regardless of the ratings. I mean, CNN's a good
example of that. Not many people watch primetime on CNN,
but Abby Phillips show is always clipped up and turns
up on your social media feed, so we can see
the most annoying man on TV, Scott Jennings. Whether we
want to or not, And then to answer you a

(39:17):
broader question about where does that leave independent media. As
I said earlier, I'm not of the school of thought
that says it's great if all mainstream media diyzed will
fill the gaps, and I think we can fill the gaps.
Someone made a very astute point on Blue Sky the
other day about you know, independent journalists can do great
journalism in its particular fields and strengths and niches and
even investigations. You have my friend over at drop site

(39:37):
News doing fantastic investigator reporting abroad. Your pro public or
and nonprofit does amazing journalism at home. But you know,
at the end of the day, that's not the same
thing as having a New York Times newsroom or a
CNN newsroom that is going to take a lot more
investment than just subscribers on substack or you know, one
generous sugar daddy billionaire can do. And I think that's

(39:59):
the problem. I don't know what the media looks like
come twenty twenty eight or twenty thirty two. I think
anyone who tells you what mainstream media will look like
five years from now is either a liar or a fool,
because just go back five years from where we are today.
It looked absolutely different back in twenty twenty one. So
the idea that today in twenty twenty six we can
predict what twenty thirty one is going to look like.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
We haven't even talked about the AI part of the puzzle.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
We have newsrooms now laying off journalists so that artificial
intelligence can just write all the stories. So many issues
with that, not just in terms of accuracy and soullessness,
but that is another issue that we're going to.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
Have to deal with.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
We're gonna have to deal with how do we tell
the truth? You asked me earlier, like, how do you
know what mainstream media is?

Speaker 3 (40:35):
You know?

Speaker 2 (40:35):
And I talked about kids in school being taught literacy.
Forget all of that. Here's a bigger picture. How do
you know what you see is even real?

Speaker 3 (40:42):
Right?

Speaker 2 (40:42):
That's another question we haven't really tackled with. I'm having
to get YouTube to take down fake videos of me
that I almost believed were me. Right, people have put
up videos of me talking in my clothes in my studio.
It looks and sounds like me, but it's not me.
And as the AI gets even better, it's going to
be even harder to tell. And then how am I
going to convince people no, I didn't say that inflammatory

(41:02):
thing that's been attributed to me on your social media side.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
How are we going to tell truth from falsehood in
that era?

Speaker 1 (41:09):
I mean that's a recurring theme, right blaming the media
or the media being the enemy. What's your sense of
why that is? And will we ever escape that with
outlets that are more independent? I mean, is it a
trust issue? Is it a scapegoating issue?

Speaker 2 (41:22):
I think right now it's escapegoating issue. We just need
to be real about what's going on in the political agenda.
I mean, this has been going on on the right
for about forty years now, this idea of you make
escape good of liberal media.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
You blame liberal media.

Speaker 2 (41:34):
You turn liberal media into a punchline at your rallies,
at your election campaigns, you work the refs as the
phrase goes, You try and get liberal media to think
they're liberal, even though liberal media is not very liberal.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
But I have friends at mainstream media organizations who.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
Have subconsciously imbibed the right wing attack on them. They
go around feeling guilty that they're biased against the right,
and then they're soft on the right as a result,
and that's the right's exact strategy. So you know, it's
a forty year strategy of trying to you know, work
the refs and undermine liberal media.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
And you know, the.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Reality is, if you're on the right right, if you're
on the right right now, and you're pushing election denial,
you're pushing climate change denial. You've got some people on
the far right pushing holocaust denal. Again, you don't want
a media that fact checks you, and therefore you have
to undermine the media itself. So liberal media becomes a
slur because really liberal media is what you mean by
reality based media. And then Donald Trump comes along, who

(42:31):
is the greatest liar of all time. He doesn't want
the media calling out his lives, say, the only way
he can survive as a public figure is to make
sure that his cultish base see the entire media, TV, print,
anyone who criticizes the dear leader as quote fake news
or as he calls them, enemies of the people, which
is a very stalin Esque fascistic view of the pre press.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
The last question I have for you. You made me
think of this when you talked about your history and
love of debating. Are you just the biggest hit with
uncles at family parties? Like do they just love talking
to you? And do you like that or is that
a pain in the ass.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
No, I like it. I like it, but I but Brown. No. Brown.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
So Brown uncles loved me even before I was because
I was the guy who could just talk about politics
all night long. And you know that Brown uncles just
want to talk about politics and conspiracies. They didn't love
the fact that I would debunk a lot of their
conspiracy theories back in the days, back in the pre
Epstein days, I was very critical of conspiracy theorists and
I used to you know, in our community cal as
you know, in the Brown community, even before WhatsApp, people

(43:31):
loved a good conspiracy theory. So they didn't like that
I was the guy who would kind of you know,
ruin a good story with fact checking. But they did
like the fact that I could talk about politics all
night long while you know, some of my friends were
just playing Nintendo. And then obviously since I've been on TV,
Brown uncles love to talk to people who've been on
TV and love to suggest things for me.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
To say on TV. Yes, of course, so yes.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
I do.

Speaker 3 (43:51):
I do enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
I do. I'm forty six years old. I am now
a brown uncle esbus be very real.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
Meddie, thank you so much, my friend, for this great conversation.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
That was my guest, Meddi Husson. He's a broadcaster and author,
a former host on MSNBC and now the CEO and
editor in chief of Zeteo. Here we go again as
a production of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffoo Media in association
with New Metric Media. Our executive producers are me kalpen

(44:22):
ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly,
Chris Kelly, and Dylan Fagan. Meghan tan is our producer
and writer. Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Our
consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith is our associate producer.
Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo by Matt Gosson, Legal
review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson and Megan Halson. Special

(44:46):
thanks to Glenn Bassner, Isaac Dunham, Adam Horn, Lane Klein
and everyone at iHeart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie
Lieberman and Nikki Etour.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Everybody, tell your friends, write a review. All of this helps.
I appreciate you listening, and until we go again, I'm Calpin.