Commentary: Mehdi Hasan reflects on Zeteo one year after launch: 'We're in a very good place'

Yahoo

15-04-2025

Journalism isn't what it used to be, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you're Mehdi Hasan.
Hasan, 45, is no stranger to the rising dissatisfaction around the state of the news media and the confusion over how we consume our news. He rose through the ranks of broadcast giants, including the BBC, Al Jazeera and MSNBC, and has written on subjects ranging from Trump's tariffs to Gaza for outlets such as the Guardian and the Huffington Post.
But no matter where he's been on camera or published, the British-born son of Indian immigrants asked the kind of tough questions that gained him a reputation as a fierce debater and unflinching proponent of high-impact, often adversarial journalism.
'When we talk about media organizations, it's often asked, 'Are they left or are they right?'' Hasan says. 'But I don't think that dynamic is helpful. For me, it's more like do they keep their heads down or do they keep their heads up?'
Hasan's unwillingness to soften the edges around hot-button topics could be the reason he's worked for more outlets than most public-facing folks in the media. His departure from MSNBC in January 2024, for example, came after his shows were canceled by the network for 'business reasons.' They offered to keep him on as a contributor, but he declined.
Instead, he started his own independent platform, the Washington, D.C.-based Zeteo. Now, on the one-year anniversary of his enterprise, Hasan talks about what it took to create an outlet somewhere between mainstream news and 'burn it all down' media.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What did it take to get Zeteo up and running?
Me and the four people who set it up. And it was Ramadan. And I was fasting. I will say I never want to do a startup company again with four people during Ramadan [laughs]. We're still a small, nimble operation, but it's not insane as four people trying to do everything. We have a political correspondent, Prem Thakker, who broke the campus deportation story. We brought on Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, members of Congress, to do a YouTube show for us called 'Bowman and Bush.' [Former Washington Post columnist] Taylor Lorenz has just become a contributor for us. We have Daniel Levy, the former Israeli peace negotiator. And we're going to be announcing more in the coming days as we approach the anniversary. So we're growing on that front.
The name Zeteo comes from the ancient Greek word for 'seeking out' or 'striving.' Why not just call your startup the Mehdi Hasan Network?
It was never going to be the Mehdi Hasan network. Obviously, I'm the face of it. I'm the founder. I do the flagship shows. But it was always about being more than me. That is the goal. If I achieve nothing else, I've provided a platform for really interesting people to say the unsayable, whether it's [Egyptian political satirist] Bassem Youssef on the podcast; John Harwood [formerly of CNN], who writes amazing political pieces for us; Pakistani novelist Fatima Bhutto; Amy Klein; Owen Jones; or Greta Thunberg. They are saying things as contributors you won't see elsewhere.
You moved to the U.S. in 2015, where you hosted a weekly show on Al Jazeera English. But just five years later, you landed your own show, 'The Mehdi Hasan Show,' on Peacock. And soon after that, you were slotted into MSNBC's lineup. That's a rapid trajectory.
When I moved here, people said to me, 'Oh, you're going to end up at CNN, MSNBC because you do great interviews.' I was like, "No one's ever going to hire me. I'm a brown, Muslim, lefty immigrant. I'm happy at Al Jazeera." Mainstream was never going to be for me, yet Phil Griffin and MSNBC took a chance on me in 2020 and hired me to do a show. I didn't think I'd last longer than six months, but I lasted for 3½ years.
As the country has become more polarized, there's been criticism that journalism is now more about activism than news gathering. What's your take?
You don't have to define activism as changing things and journalism as not changing things. The biggest changes in our society have come from journalism. Investigative journalism, at its very best, changes things. It holds people accountable. It forces people to change structures, reform institutions. So I think the best journalism is impact journalism that drives change. Otherwise, what is the point? Horse-race journalism — who's up, who's down, who's doing well in the polls — that's never been my interest. I do it occasionally because it has its role, but that's never been what drives me. I don't think it should be what drives our industry, either. I want to make a change. That's why I do what I do. Otherwise, I'd be an accountant.
Where does Zeteo stand in the crowded field of new media startups?
One thing I was very clear about when I launched Zeteo was that I was going to be walking that tightrope between being anti-establishment and establishment, between mainstream and non-mainstream. A lot of people didn't like that. What happens to a lot of left-wing media outlets is that they get marginalized or marginalize themselves. They're seen as fringe. But there's no point in doing excellent journalism, excellent op-eds or commissioning brilliant documentaries if no one sees them.
Did you plan on becoming a journalist?
I went to Oxford University. I did PPE [Politics, Philosophy and Economics]. Most of my graduating class went off to be management consultants and investment bankers. I went off to get a 13,000-pound-a-year job, to the great disappointment of my Asian parents. But working in TV seemed important.
As kids of immigrants, our parents came from places where the media was hobbled or where there is no free press. Now you're in the U.S., and the media is facing unprecedented challenges from the Trump administration.
It's a risky time. People keep saying to me, 'Trump's good for business, right? You're going to get loads of subscribers because he talks crazy stuff and makes politics interesting.' Yeah, in theory, in the sheer generation of news stories, he's good for business. But in terms of the big picture of a free press — no, he's not. I worry about the future of my organization in a country that's going fascist very quickly. I worry about Zeteo as a small startup at a time when big media companies like ABC and CBS and some might argue the L.A. Times — their owners are rolling over for Trump. And you've got MAGA folks who are intimidating journalists. For a while I've had prominent people in the MAGA movement saying deport and denaturalize Mehdi Hasan, and in the current climate, that's not the kind of thing you take lightly. Journalists have been intimidated, threatened, harassed.
Now, having said that, we've got to put it in context. I'm still in the U.S., still protected by the 1st Amendment. I'm not in Gaza, where over 200 journalists have been killed. It's the worst conflict for journalists in history. The Civil War, WWI, WWII — none of it comes close. Yes, it's a risky time for journalists in America, but in context, we're still 10,000 times in a better place than journalists in Gaza, for example.
This month marks one year since Zeteo's official launch. How are things going?
I'm a very cautious person. I've never run a business before. I don't have that entrepreneurial streak of risk-taking. When I launched this, I was super cautious about what we could achieve. But, amazingly, the support I got after I left MSNBC and announced Zeteo blew me away. We blasted through all of our early benchmarks, metrics and targets, and by the time we hit the summer, we were well ahead of ourselves. So we're in a very good place.
Can you name some of the benchmarks?
A year in, most startups don't break even. But this year we've made a small profit, which we weren't planning on. We're at 400,000 subscribers, which is not where I thought we'd be. We're No. 6 on Substack, behind Bari Weiss, Heather Cox [Richardson] and the Bulwark folks. We have 715,000 followers on YouTube right now and we're growing by more than 1,000 a day. We've got more than 40,000 paying subscribers, which helps pay the bills. And we've got over 1,000 founding members who pay $500 a year to support us.
Is corporate media adequately covering the America we live in today?
My position is not that the corporate media's dead or that all mainstream media is bad. That would be ridiculous. I've worked in these organizations. There are great journalists doing great work there. My position is that mainstream media gets a lot wrong, and there are a lot of gaps that need to be filled, and that is what Zeteo is doing. That doesn't mean I want to burn it all down. We wouldn't be able to exist as a small media business if we weren't able to rely on great investigative scoops from certain people at the Post or Politico or the New York Times. That doesn't mean I like everything that those outlets do.
For a time, the journalistic standards in legacy newsrooms made covering MAGA conspiracy theories, lies and genuinely fake news incredibly difficult. It was like using an old dialect to describe a new language.
Even in opinion journalism, calling Trump a racist caused a debate in newsrooms for a decade. More and more people now say the R-word. But for a time, it was 'he said something racially tinged, racially divisive, racially loaded.' It's like, just say racist. It's fewer letters. Let's not insult our viewers and our readers. Let's not disrespect them. Everyone knows what's going on.
They know 'mistruth' is just a softer word for 'lie.'
My position is very simple: If you say something false more than once after you've been corrected, it's a lie. That's Trump 100 times over.
You are known for being unapologetically outspoken, and pinning your debate opponents on divisive issues. You even channeled your superpower into a book, 'Win Every Argument.'
There's always been that shadowing around me wherever I've been. It's made people uncomfortable in a lot of places. I'm not going to name an outlet, but I will say this, there have been times where an interview I've done has gone viral and people are like, 'Oh, my God, mic drop! The person's been destroyed,' to use YouTube language. That's what people know me for. Then I'll mention that to a friend or family member, and they will say, but do your bosses even want that? And it's like, "Oh, I didn't think of that. Good question."
Which brings us back to MSNBC…
When MSNBC canceled my shows, I knew that I didn't want to just go to another network or another paper. I've worked for a lot of places in my career: BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, NBC. I write a monthly column for the Guardian, but I didn't want to go work for the Guardian. I've already done stuff for the Intercept and the New Statesman. I wanted to do my own thing, so I thought if not now, when? This idea that I needed to speak freely crystallized pretty quickly, especially in the climate we're in with Gaza, the return of Trump, fascism. As far as ever being employed by anyone else again, I think that ship has sailed.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.