We are nearly six weeks into this bombing campaign and ground invasion.
The Gaza Health Ministry says Israel has killed more than 11,000 people in Gaza,
including the Hamas controlled Hamas.
Let me finish.
Hamas controls question. No, no, no, but you have to.
- You can't. - Say that.
No, but you said you have to say the Hamas controlled.
- You can say. - That.
I have to say what you asked me to say.
The man you just heard from the host of that show is Mehdi Hasan.
And just this morning, it was announced by MSNBC that his show will be canceled.
The Mehdi Hasan Show will no longer air over the weekends.
Now the network is announcing a major weekend overhaul for the network.
So let's get into those details.
Now, MSNBC says that they will be debuting a new ensemble program
that will air weekend mornings.
The changes will take effect on January 13th, and this will alter almost every
hour of their weekend programing, where MSNBC has, in fact struggled to draw the
ratings that they need to draw for years.
Now, the new show, The Weekend, is billed as a politics
and Washington focused program.
It will be hosted from Washington, D.C. by
MSNBC anchors Elisa Alicia menendez, Simo,
Symone Sanders Townsend and Michael Steele, who used to be the head
of the Republican National Committee.
By the way, on Saturdays and Sundays from 8 to 10 a.m.
Eastern time.
Now, both Sanders, Townsend and Menendez will be leaving their weekend programs.
Whatever they're hosting right now, that's going to end so they can do
this new show with the ensemble crew.
Now, other shifts include Jonathan Capehart's show to 6 p.m.
Eastern Time on Saturday and Sunday. Who cares?
Honestly, I don't care.
Like, I don't even know who these hosts are.
No one watches these people.
The heart of this story is why did they do away with Mehdi Hasan?
Is it because he is aggressive in the way
that he balances the ongoing war in Gaza?
And when I say balances, I mean, you know, for the most part in
American corporate media, it's pretty one sided on behalf of the Israeli government.
But Mehdi Hasan is much more balanced and actually provides the perspective
of Palestinians, especially in this war, dealing with the bombardments, dealing
with the, you know, block in humanitarian aid and fuel, getting into the Gaza Strip.
And so there are a lot of people out there speculating that he was let go
for those reasons, but actually, in this particular case, disagree with them.
And I'll explain why in just a moment. Jenk.
Yeah, I think there are three different issues.
One is the fact that he was aggressively defending Palestinians,
and we'll get into that.
And it might be the most minor of the three.
It might be. We'll talk about it.
Second is that he was a progressive, and he was pretty much the only
progressive on cable news at all.
And so I thought, tick, tick. Tick tick tick.
Tick tick tick.
And but the third reason I think is the most the one that I think is
the most relevant and the reason that they made the decision, which is he
aggressively challenged the guests.
And on cable news, they hate that because they're worried
about losing access to guests.
And in fact, now, some of you might remember I had
a similar situation at MSNBC and when now,
in my case, I did not take the job.
Many agreed to continue as a contributor.
When they offered me a weekend job, I said no, thank you.
And then the head of MSNBC at the time, Phil Griffin,
when talking to the New York Times.
I don't know why he admitted this, but he admitted Jake was causing us
trouble in getting guests for the network because he was so tough on the on
the guests that he was interviewing.
I mean, people really do like mediocre, lukewarm interviews where there's
really no genuine exchange of ideas.
So I think they were right to do so, Jake. I think they were right to do so.
But it's important that you understand that both so that you understand
the full picture of why Mehdi Hasan was at least his show was canceled.
And because it isn't so much about Mehdi Hasan as it is about cable news overall
and television overall, it's that's a window into how they make decisions.
And that's why, if you've ever wondered why is everybody on TV so vanilla
like Ryan's like going non-news, nonpolitical like Ryan Seacrest, most
vanilla guy you've ever seen in your life.
Like, you go down the list, they're all vanilla.
Anderson Cooper et cetera. Wolf Blitzer robots, fake plastic.
This is exactly the like. And sometimes they have good moments.
And then you'll be like, hey, Anderson Cooper cried during Hurricane Katrina.
He was human for a second.
And then people were like, wow, oh my God, humanity, right?
But the reason they don't want the humanity and they want fake plastic robots
is because if you show emotion or you, you actually aggressively
challenge the powerful, that is going to cause a lot of problems.
You know, later in the show today, we're going to talk about the whole
Elon Musk ex advertiser debacle that just keeps playing out over and over again.
But I think that the two stories are actually connected.
Right.
Because it is definitely true that advertisers want advertisement friendly
programing and that typically means super boring, nothing controversial, no passion.
And let's also keep it real.
Media companies are owned by massive corporate conglomerates.
And so when the corporations own the media,
you're not going to get hard hitting muckraking journalists or journalism.
And so look, let's be completely open, honest and balanced with this story,
because the fact of the matter is, you know, you look at Mehdi Hassan's ratings
over the weekends when his show would air, not great ratings, right.
But let's also be honest and fair in that none of the shows did well ratings wise.
Yeah.
The other thing to keep in mind is I know that there are a lot of people
speculating that they let him go because of his views on this ongoing war
in Gaza, that they want to silence Muslim hosts on this network.
But that's not true.
Two people familiar with the move, which MSNBC privately announced
to staff Thursday morning, told Sema4 that Hasan will become
an on camera analyst and fill in host.
The network plans to expand host
Ayman Mohyeldin his weekend programing
to two hours to replace Hasan Show.
So his show is going to go from 1 hour to 2 hours over the weekend,
and that will take place during the time that Mehdi Hasan Show would usually air.
If you're unfamiliar with this host is to be quite frank, I was unfamiliar with him.
He is an Egyptian born political commentator who is also critical of
Israel's treatment of Palestinians, so he will now have a total broadcast time
of four hours over the course of the weekend, rather than just two hours.
Yeah, so I think the anti-Muslim thing is mixed.
So on the one hand, when the the war broke out between Israel
and Gaza, it's not really a war.
I mean, it's just Hamas did a terrible terrorist attack
and then Israel obliterated Gaza.
Gaza has no ability to conduct a war.
Anyways, when that happened, all of a sudden the three Muslim hosts on MSNBC,
including Ali Velshi, Mehdi Hasan and Mujahideen were nowhere to be found.
And so people were like, oh, that's kind of curious.
Now, on the other hand, you have to give MSNBC credit
for having three Muslim hosts, so that's a hell of a thing I was on there before.
So and I don't know that they even knew that I was Muslim.
But still, you give credit where credit is due.
When you look at the ratings of Mehdi Hasan, like people say,
oh, he had bad ratings.
No, wait a minute.
The entire weekend is a disaster zone at MSNBC.
Yeah. Weekend programing.
Like who sits around and watches cable news programing
over the weekend like. 70 year olds.
I'm sorry, but that's just it's a literal fact.
- Okay, so you got to. - Go bird watching.
- Do something fun. - Yeah. 70 year olds also do that.
Okay.
But anyways, so when I looked at his overall ratings they're like, oh, he's
lower than Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes.
Of course they have prime time shows on, on, on the weekdays.
And, and and you get a sense of if they're trying to bury a guy
based on how they leak his ratings.
So I'll give you my example.
By the time that MSNBC and I had the conflict, it was June of that year
and I had the highest ratings they had ever gotten in that time period.
But when they started leaking to the press, they're like,
Jake's numbers in January were bad.
January. We're in June.
Okay. They had to go.
Back six months to find bad numbers because it isn't about the numbers.
Right?
And so both for me and Mehdi Hassan, it's a complicated issue.
In my case, being me being Muslim had nothing to do with it, right?
It was more about access to the guests.
It was about being progressive and challenging Democrats, etcetera.
Mehdi Hassan A lot of similar issues, progressive challenges, guests.
So that's the thing that they care more about.
And there's two things.
One is the advertisers that Anna already mentioned.
The second is, remember, guys, their giant multi-billion dollar corporations
that oftentimes need permission from the government
to do certain things like mergers.
Comcast couldn't have bought MSNBC if they didn't get government permission.
So a lot of times they have to kiss the government's ass because it serves
their business interests.
Before Comcast, GE owned MSNBC and at the time, MSNBC cheerlead for
the Iraq war even more than Fox News did.
Why GE was a giant defense contractor.
So there are these business interests that they never, ever talk about on air,
because that reveals the game a little bit.
And you find out about the game when they do things like this.
And look, there's a difference between the kind of viewership Mehdi
Hassan's weekend show on MSNBC would get versus how widely viewed the clips
that were posted online from his show.
Like it was.
They would go viral oftentimes. Right.
So there's a difference between the two audiences.
And so online audiences want raw, authentic, real analysis, real commentary.
They want honesty.
Whereas, you know, look, I just think that cable television
is a dying form of media.
I think it's pretty clear at this point, if anything, the benefit of cable news is
they do have these interviews time to time that happen to be useful for our purposes,
because we're able to hear what some of these various individuals
in various positions of power have to say about big news stories of the day.
But aside from that, I mean, you don't go to CNN, MSNBC, and I don't think anyone
should go to Fox News either for analysis.
But I know a lot of people do trust Fox News and what the hosts say there,
which is unfortunate when it comes to CNN and MSNBC.
They've been trying to catch up to Fox News forever,
and it's not going to happen.
I just don't think it is.
See, that's the other difference between Mehdi Hassan and, for example,
the two other Muslim hosts, which I got no problems with.
They're good folks and they do interesting reporting and oftentimes helpful.
Right. But Mehdi Hassan is.
He's, for lack of a better word, more passionate.
Right.
And his passion comes just through his questions.
Right? It's different than what we do.
We do a lot of commentary, but the reason that they go viral
is because he asks good, tough questions, which the general population loves,
but executives don't like, for all the reasons that we've stated here.
So every time you see and whereas Vichy and again, no disrespect to the other two,
they don't go viral that often.
And that's because they're they just have a different style.
Like Allie Bell.
She's been on cable news forever and he's got a more calm,
a little bit more vanilla style.
Let's be honest. Right.
So that's the fact that he's Muslim doesn't bother them at all because he
does the style that they are okay with.
But again, those two guys are good guys and they do present the Palestinian
or Muslim perspective from time to time.
And we appreciate that. So no disrespect of them.
But when Mehdi Hassan does it in a way that grabs a lot of attention,
it becomes a bigger problem.
And then here he and we showed you that clip in the beginning
where he's super aggressively challenging and Israeli official.
Well, then Israeli officials probably went back to MSNBC.
And this is really important.
And NBC, which they're connected and NBC is bigger and said, hey, I don't
know if we can work with you guys because that is what happens behind the scenes.
And it's not just about Israel. Guys don't take it the wrong way.
American government officials do that more than anyone else.
And so that's what creates the pressure that then lets them leads them
to doing this kind of action.
Thanks for watching.
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