Mehdi Hasan Gives Blistering Explanation For Why He Rejected Tucker Carlson’s Invitation to Appear on Fox News Show

My guest on this week’s episode of The Interview is Mehdi Hasan, whose sharp political commentary and knack for tough interviews has earned him renown, a buzzy program on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock, and as of February, a new Sunday night show on MSNBC.

We spoke about how the news media handled the Trump years, what lessons were learned, and how to deal with interview subjects who deny the results of the 2020 election. As a British-born journalist, Hasan is partial to a more aggressive style of questioning than his American counterparts, where a certain deference is often afforded to powerful interview subjects (See: his interview with John Bolton, in which he asked if the deaths of countless innocent civilians in Iraq “ever keep you up at night?”)

And Hasan, who was not shy about referring to false statements from Donald Trump as lies, is equally intolerant of those who would deny the results of the election on behalf of Trump. He told me that if Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw had denied Joe Biden won the election in their exchange this past Sunday night, he would have ended the interview right then and there. (Crenshaw, wisely, did not engage in such denial).

I also wanted the UK native to weigh in on the next move for Rupert Murdoch’s ever expanding media empire: The launch of a right wing news channel in the U.K., apparently modeled on Fox News.

Hasan is concerned that the “culture war” flavor of so much American media coverage has been imported to the U.K., but is optimistic that the country’s regulation of broadcast media will keep wayward news outlets in check.

As for Fox News, Hasan thinks the network has an outsize influence over American politics.

“It has massive control over the Republican Party,” he told me. “You cannot understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the pressure that they exercise, the influence that they operate.”

Hasan went on to call it “disgusting” that Rupert Murdoch was “first in line” to receive the Covid vaccine, while “Tucker Carlson [was] pushing vaccine skepticism on his show the same day. I just find that completely irresponsible and reckless.”

“Would you go on Tucker Carlson’s show if invited on?” I asked.

“No,” Hasan said. “I was invited on,” he added, noting that before he joined NBC both Carlson and Laura Ingraham invited him on their prime time Fox News shows. “I don’t want to legitimize the platform.”

He explained:

There’s something called a hygiene test. You have to have a hygiene test in your personal life and your career. And for me, Fox News doesn’t meet that hygiene test. I can’t go on a channel that pumps out what is akin to white nationalist propaganda every night. Covid denialism with tens of thousands of people, including friends of mine, who passed away. I can’t go on a channel that, you know, demonizes Muslim women who are in Congress as somehow un-American or anti-American. No, I can’t go on, certainly not on those primetime shows where, you know, it is just propaganda. During the Trump era it was state TV. And now it is just, you know, pushing, it’s QAnon adjacent. You look at Tucker Carlson now basically carrying water for the QAnon conspiracy, which the FBI thinks is a domestic terror threat. So no, I don’t want to be any part of that.

Hasan added that he thinks Carlson doesn’t “play fair” in his interviews, pointing to the Fox host’s profane interview with historian Rutger Bregman that never made it to air.

“That’s my own personal view,” Hasan added. “A channel that pushes QAnon and Islamophobia and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about globalists and Covid denialism and vaccine denialism? No. Not for me. Sorry.”

I asked if there is a personality on Fox whom Hasan believes is a good journalist.

“Chris Wallace,” Hasan replied, calling the Fox anchor one of the best interviewers in the United States.

Watch above.