Mehdi Hasan and Ayman Mohyeldin Are Doing Something Radical for Cable TV: Presenting the Palestinian Side

By Lloyd Grove and Maxwell Tani, The Daily Beast

13 May 21

Much of the American television news coverage of the ongoing violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip has followed a familiar, decades-old format—with two major exceptions.

ritish American television anchor Mehdi Hasan, who hosts an eponymous Sunday night program on MSNBC and a weeknight show on NBC’s streaming Peacock Network, has spent the past several days challenging the U.S.-media status quo by doing something practically unheard of on an American television outlet.

So has Egyptian American journalist Ayman Mohyeldin, the anchor of a weekday afternoon show on MSNBC.

Covering the increasingly lethal exchange of rockets and bombs between Hamas militants in Gaza and the Israeli Defense Force—which as of Wednesday night had killed an estimated 65 Palestinians, including 16 children, and seven Jewish Israelis, including a 5-year-old child—Hasan and Mohyeldin are devoting substantial airtime to the Palestinian point of view.

Their portrayal of the conflict—which has included sympathetic interviews with Gaza residents and contentious, occasionally acrimonious debates with Israeli officials—has prompted cheers among some within the network who have been pleased to see MSNBC elevate voices seemingly skeptical of Israeli military force. But it has also rankled some American supporters of the Israeli government, while prompting some eye-rolling among a few of their NBC colleagues.

On Wednesday, for instance, conservative journalist Seth Mandel, executive editor of the right-leaning Washington Examiner newspaper, accused Mohyeldin in a tweet of “denying Israel’s existence” because of the anchor’s aggressive grilling of embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev.

An MSNBC spokesperson said Hasan and Mohyeldin were unavailable for comment.

The Oxford-educated Hasan, who has been steeped in the conflicts of the Middle East as a sharp-edged opinion journalist for the past two decades, and the hard-charging Mohyeldin, who spent two years living in Gaza as a correspondent for Al Jazeera English, have been attempting to provide the sort of context that is uncommon among their broadcast peers.

“Just a reminder the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t begin when western media decide to start covering it,” Mohydelin tweeted this past Monday as hundreds of rockets from Gaza began to fly into Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and other Israeli cities. The violence was sparked last Friday as Israeli authorities moved to evict Palestinians from their homes to accommodate Jewish settlers in the predominantly Arab Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and IDF soldiers lobbed tear gas into East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, where fasting worshippers were celebrating Ramadan.

“Don’t forget the pretext and the context to understanding what is happening tonight,” Mohyeldin continued, adding the hashtags #gaza #Jerusalem #SheikhJarrah #israel #Palestine.

On Wednesday he posted an emotional plea on Instagram for Gazan civilians being bombed out of their houses by Israeli airstrikes.

Like Mohyeldin, Hasan—whose much smaller Peacock Network streaming audience is not publicly measured—has stopped short of criticizing colleagues directly. But in a monologue on Monday, he complained that framing the escalating violence as a “clash”—the description numerous anchors and correspondents have used over the past week—is woefully mischaracterizing the situation.

“The fundamental unavoidable reality at the heart of this conflict is there is an asymmetry of power here,” he said. “One side is the occupier. The other side is occupied. And media coverage, political commentary, international interventions that don’t reflect this fact... are all, I’m sorry to say, part of the problem.”

Indeed, much of the American television news coverage of the ongoing violence in the Middle East has followed a familiar, decades-old format regarding the Jewish state and the Palestinians: Anchors on cable and the nightly news networks seldom stray from placing blame on “both sides,” while the on-the-ground correspondents have leaned heavily on information about the escalating violence shared by Israel’s military and other government authorities.

Mohyeldin has dedicated large chunks of his show over the past week to the outburst of violence, placing heavy emphasis on the Palestinian experience while other cable news programs have flicked at the conflict briefly. On Tuesday, his interview with Palestinian activist Mohammed el-Kurd, along with a second one on CNN, went viral as el-Kurd described how his family was being forced out of their longtime home by Israeli authorities, whom he accused of “ethnic cleansing.”

On Wednesday, Mohyeldin featured Gaza-based political science professor Mukhemir Abu Sada, who described the dire conditions on the ground. Mohyeldin, along with NBC’s newly named (but still London-based) Jerusalem correspondent, Raf Sanchez, gave airtime to critics of Big Tech censorship of some Palestinian posts on Twitter and Instagram (restrictions both companies claimed were accidental).

On Wednesday night’s installment of his Peacock Network show, meanwhile, the left-leaning Hasan presented a nine minute-long segment—an eternity on American television—featuring an interview with a jittery Palestinian cultural official in Gaza City, as several loud bangs punctuated the conversation.

“We are living under heavy airstrikes in the last 48 hours,” Fadi Abu Shammala, the executive director of the General Union of Cultural Centers in Gaza, told Hasan as a thunderous clap interrupted their exchange. “So you are hearing now the bombing. They are bombing now during this interview. This is the sound that we are used to hear[ing].”

Just before Shammala came on camera, Hasan had criticized American television writ large (and arguably his own employer) for focusing on Gaza only when Hamas starts launching missiles. He noted that the Gaza strip—despite an Israeli withdrawal in 2005—is still blockaded at its borders and on its coast, with Israel severely restricting Gaza’s fishing rights. Thus it’s a disaster economically, with more than half the population living in poverty. “Back in 2010, former British Conservative prime minister David Cameron even described Gaza as an open prison camp,” Hasan said.

While most cable news guests largely abstain from placing blame on particular actors over the past several days, the airwaves have had their fair share of vocal supporters of the Israeli military action in Gaza. Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used his interview on Jake Tapper’s CNN show to call out the Palestinian militants, while on Brian Williams’ MSNBC show, former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash praised Israel’s military response to Hamas’ attacks, expressing frustration with Hamas rocket attacks that disrupted Israelis’ dinner plans, while failing to note similar disruptions caused by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

“No country in the world could survive air raid sirens all night and people running into bomb shelters during the dinner hour,” he said. “This is not what a civilized society should have to put up with, and I think it’s right tonight for the United States to stand with its ally Israel.”

James Zogby, longtime president of the Washington, D.C.-based Arab-American Institute, offered praise for Hasan and Mohyeldin, singling them out as bright spots in a predictable yet, in Zogby’s view, misleading portrayal of events.

“What you have here are two very qualified, very skillful, really smart people who are incidentally of Arab or, in Mehdi’s case, Muslim background, and they’re just doing the job they’re supposed to do,” Zogby told The Daily Beast.

But he doubted that their unorthodox approach will have much influence on American television news writ large, despite the fact that recent public opinion polling, such as a Gallup Poll released in March, suggest that Americans, especially younger Americans, are slightly less likely to support an aggressive Israel while warming to the plight of Palestinians.

“It is not a question of policy so much as it is the fact that, like politicians, TV journalists are uninformed,” Zogby said. “I can write a book and a half about TV journalists getting it wrong on the Middle East and never being held accountable for it. It’s not so much of bias as it is that media people who know [domestic] politics, and are very keen about challenging candidates on issues, just don’t know enough to do that. So they end up reporting what the company line is.”

It's Time to Kick Gas

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

13 May 21

And do it as quickly as possible.

e’re used to the idea that CO₂—one carbon atom, two oxygen atoms—is a dangerous molecule. Indeed, driving down carbon-dioxide emissions has become the way that many leaders and journalists describe our task. But CH₄—one carbon atom combined with four hydrogen atoms, otherwise known as methane—is carbon dioxide’s evil twin. It traps heat roughly eighty times more efficiently than carbon dioxide does, which explains why the fact that it’s spiking in the atmosphere scares scientists so much. Despite the pandemic lockdown, 2020 saw the largest single increase in methane in the atmosphere since we started taking measurements, in the nineteen-eighties. It’s a jump that, last month, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called “fairly surprising and disturbing.”

If there’s any good news, it’s that the spike in methane doesn’t—yet—seem to be coming in large percentages from the runaway melt of methane-ice formations beneath the polar oceans or those in tundra soils. That would be a nightmare scenario because there wouldn’t be anything we could do about it—it’s global heating on automatic. For the moment, most of the increase seems to be from sources we can control: rice paddies, livestock, and, especially, the rapid rise in drilling and fracking for gas. Two decades ago, people thought that natural gas, though a fossil fuel, might help slow climate change because, when you burn it in a power station, it produces less carbon than burning coal does. Now we understand that natural gas—which is primarily made of methane—leaks unburned at every stage from fracking to combustion, whether in a power plant or on top of your stove, in sufficient quantities to make it an enormous climate danger. The Trump Administration abandoned any effort even to reduce that leakage, an absurd gift to the fossil-fuel industry that the Biden Administration is preparing to take away. But plugging leaks isn’t enough: we’ve got to stop producing natural gas as quickly as possible, and replace it with renewables that generate neither carbon nor methane. As I wrote last month, that’s now entirely possible; sun and wind power have become so cheap so fast that they’re more economical than gas, and batteries are coming down the same kind of cost curve, so nightfall is no longer the problem it once was.

But there are other reasons to kick gas. A report from Australia’s Climate Council, released last week, finds that the health impact of having a gas cooktop in your home is roughly equivalent to having a cigarette smoker puffing away in the corner, and accounts for about twelve per cent of childhood asthma. “It’s odourless, it’s invisible, it’s a bit of silent enemy,” the C.E.O. of Asthma Australia said. “People might feel differently if they understood that their gas appliances were emitting a range of toxic substances.” That is why the gas industry has lobbied so hard to prevent that perception. In at least fourteen U.S. states, the industry lobby is pushing bills that would prevent local governments from restricting the use of gas; a particular threat comes from the new appliances—chiefly air-source heat pumps and water heaters, and induction cooktops—that are now widely available and increasingly cheap. (Even the Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages unfailingly defend the oil-and-gas industry, admitted in a review that induction cooking is “safer and faster than gas.”) Indeed, leaked documents obtained last week by E&E News show that fifteen big gas utilities have mounted a Consortium to Combat Electrification. “None of these companies want to write their own obituary,” Deborah Gordon, a former petroleum engineer now at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, said. “If you’re going to bend this curve, and we bend it quickly, there are going to be casualties. Some will transform, some will consolidate, some will go away.”

At the moment, however, they’re still very much here, and they might as well call the effort a Consortium to Promote Asthma and Melt the Poles. But, if we can kick gas quickly, there’s some hope that lies in the structure of that CH₄ molecule: it only lasts about ten years in the atmosphere, as opposed to a century for carbon dioxide. This means that, if we can somehow reduce emissions dramatically, it will fade fast, buying us a little time to take on carbon. “If we can make a big enough cut in methane in the next decade, we’ll see public-health benefits within the decade, and climate benefits within two decades,” Drew Shindell, an earth scientist at Duke University who has worked extensively on methane, told the Times. But it had better happen fast. Here’s Euan Nisbet, a climate scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, reacting to last month’s news of spiking methane levels: “I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad. This breaks my heart.”

Passing the Mic

Christina Conklin, an artist, writer, and researcher, and Marina Psaros, a sustainability expert, will publish “The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis” in July. With maps and text, it explores port cities and coastlines that may be obliterated by rising seas—Shanghai, Houston, New York, the Cook Islands, and B?n Tre, in Vietnam. I spoke with Conklin, who lives next to the Pacific, in Half Moon Bay, California. (Our conversation has been edited.)

Humans built many of their most important settlements along the ocean for obvious reasons, but how should we be thinking about that now?

The hard truth is that seas are going to rise for centuries to come—it could be at least three feet this century and much more after that. This is difficult to absorb, but we need to have realistic, civic conversations about moving to higher ground in the coming decades. Water always finds its level, so we will need to rebuild over time, finding ways to fairly relocate vulnerable communities away from flood zones.

Strengthening storms and rising seas may be the easier climate challenges to address: all we need to do is move out of the way. Actually, changing ocean chemistry and warming waters are far more critical in my view, because they are altering the living system of the ocean itself, which is the foundation and source of life on earth. The fact is, our current addiction to fossil fuels is causing ocean acidification, deoxygenation, and warming that is throwing many marine ecosystems into crisis. Half the stories in “The Atlas of Disappearing Places” cover these impacts on food webs, feedback loops, and basic biological processes. I illustrated it with ink-on-seaweed maps to convey the scope and scale of the issues.

What’s a place that really illustrates our troubles?

The Cook Islands is a good example. It is a tiny island nation in the South Pacific that voted in 2017 to designate its territorial waters as the world’s largest marine protected area. The commitment reflected Cook Islanders’ values and heritage as an indigenous, seagoing people, and also allowed for sustainable development. Around the same time, a few powerful people invited seabed-mining companies to “explore” the possibility of scraping manganese nodules off the seafloor in these waters, potentially destroying the ecosystem—and the Prime Minister gave in to pressure for quick profit. [Last year, the government said that it would allow mining to offset the loss of tourism business during the pandemic.] This sort of conflict between local communities and extractive industries is often out of sight, but every choice we make has an environmental impact somewhere.

We each have the responsibility—the response-ability—to imagine and build healthy societies. Each of the book’s twenty chapters envisions a “future history” from the year 2050, showing things that we can do to change the story from one of heedless consumption to one of resilient, regenerative culture.