Ro Khanna Insists MSNBC ‘Owes The Public An Explanation’ For Canceling Mehdi Hasan’s Show During Israel-Hamas War

Progressive Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) reacted to Thursday’s news that Mehdi Hasan’s MSNBC show had been canceled by insisting that the network “owes the public an explanation.”

“It is bad optics for MSNBC to cancel @mehdirhasan’s show right at a time when he is vocal for human rights in Gaza with the war ongoing,” Khanna wrote on Twitter/X.

“As a strong supporter of free speech, MSNBC owes the public an explanation for this decision. Why would they choose to do this now?” added the California congressman.

MSNBC announced earlier in the day that Hasan would stay on at the network as an on-air analyst, but that his show would end and be picked up by Ayman Mohyeldin. Both Mohyeldin and Hasan had grabbed headlines in recent weeks over their controversial coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict and Hamas’s devastating attack on October 7th.

In mid-October, Semafor’s Max Tani reported that MSNBC had benched Hasan, Mohyeldin, and Ali Velshi – all Mulsim commentators who previously worked for Qatar-owned Al Jazeera.

“The network did not air a scheduled Thursday night episode of The Mehdi Hasan Show on the streaming platform Peacock. MSNBC also reversed a plan for Ayman Mohyeldin to fill in this week on the network for host Joy Reid’s 7 p.m. show on Thursday and Friday. Mohyeldin, an Egyptian-American journalist and veteran NBC News correspondent covered the conflict from Gaza for two years. In 2021, he aggressively questioned Israeli leaders on strikes on the territory,” Tani wrote at the time.

MSNBC publicly denied the report and all three have since been on-air.

Notably, MSNBC’s major shake-up changed almost every hour of its weekend programming, which has long struggled in the ratings against Fox News and CNN.