MSNBC Anchor Ayman Mohyeldin Discusses How US Media Covers the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: ‘Historically, This Has Not Gotten Balanced Coverage’
Virginia Sherwood/MSNBC
Ayman Mohyeldin spent years as a foreign correspondent before settling into the anchor chair at MSNBC, where he is now the host of a new weekend prime time show.
In this week’s episode of The Interview podcast, we discussed his career covering conflict across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Mohyeldin delivered incredible reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gaza, and the Arab Spring after getting his start as a desk assistant at NBC in 2000.
His coverage of the recent violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — which included interviews with Palestinian activists and Israeli officials — made headlines. Not just because the Egyptian-American journalist is one of the few Muslim anchors on cable news, but also because of his experience reporting on the region, which included two years living in the Gaza Strip.
As host of MSNBC show Ayman — which airs Saturday nights at 8 p.m. and Sunday nights at 9 p.m. — he has shifted to focus more on domestic political coverage while keeping an eye on international news.
I called up Ayman on Wednesday to discuss his incredible career, his new MSNBC show, and the way American media covers foreign conflicts.
On how American media covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
I think that historically, this conflict has not gotten a balanced coverage across all forms of American media. And hearing from Palestinians about their experiences and their perspectives and their opinions, not just in the peak moment of a conflict, but throughout the low intensity periods of the conflict, is rare. And so I think one of the things that I’ve always set out to do is to widen the conversation by saying, let’s have the conversation with people from both sides.
Which again, if you followed the totality of my coverage in the span of that period, I interviewed Israeli officials. I believe I was the last person to interview Naftali Bennett, who then became the Israeli prime minister. I interviewed [former Israeli diplomat] Mark Regev. I mean, we interviewed a totality of people on both sides of the conflict in this span. But we set out to make sure that in the coverage, we also heard from Palestinians about their experiences and what they wanted to convey to the outside world about how they were living through this period.
On living in Gaza
Gaza is one of the most fascinating places I’ve lived for a whole host of reasons. One, the people there demonstrate a kind of resilience and a fortitude that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Like anywhere you live, there is a kind of simplicity to life about human interaction, which is you care about your family, you care about your job, you care about the safety of your friends and family. And Gaza has that in the face of incredible, incredible adversity, adversity that I had never seen in so many of the other places that I had covered for a whole host of reasons. What they’re facing internally, in terms of the political pressures and the pressure they face living in a very tightly enclosed enclave with no freedom to travel, no freedom to move, no freedom to dream beyond what the reality is.
I remember when I lived in Gaza, there were people who — and I can only imagine it’s gotten worse — there was a generation of Palestinians who were born, who had never even left the Gaza Strip to go beyond what they had seen. And I had met people who had gotten accepted into universities and wanted to go abroad but because of the blockade on the Gaza Strip, were never able to pursue that. So for me, there is this kind of resilience about life there that is absolutely inspiring, the way people carry themselves. And there’s a tremendous amount of frustration that this is not the way it has to be. And because of the geopolitics of what has happened and the ongoing conflict and the blockade that’s imposed on people there, it’s completely unfair and completely problematic for people who are apolitical. The reality is, when you live in Gaza, you cannot remove yourself from the politics and you are punished collectively for the actions of what is happening in the broader sense of the conflict.
On activists criticizing how the press covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
I’ve gotten criticized for simply using the world “conflict.” And when you’re dealing with Twitter and you have limitations in terms of character and people get upset, like, ‘You shouldn’t use the word conflict. This is an X, Y, and Z.’ This is their interpretation. I’m not going to sit here and debate with activists as to whether or not the word conflict is applicable to something that has been taking place for years, that ebbs and flows in different periods. And you can’t just selectively choose when you want to join into the conversation of what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians. It’s important to have that kind of longevity of the past 100 years and speak about it openly and frankly, and not just kind of jump into the moment where this is the trend and everybody on social media is now kind of aware of what you can or cannot say, and they’re trying to make certain words off-limits and taboo on both sides, because that, ultimately, is counterproductive and is not honest. It’s not grounded in reality.
On getting his start in journalism
It started at NBC News. I was a student at American University in Washington, D.C. NBC, at the time, had their studios on Nebraska Avenue, right across the campus from American University. And I had gotten to know a Today show producer who is a lifelong friend of mine, and he told me that, you should consider applying for the desk assistant program at NBC, which I did.
And my first day ever working in news was President Bush’s inauguration. That was literally the first day I showed up to a newsroom. And that’s essentially how it began.
What happened over the next couple of years was really out of my control in the sense that I started working for NBC. And you may recall that summer of 2001 was actually a very slow news cycle. There was, you know, shark attacks off the coast of Florida in North Carolina. There was a big murder mystery political scandal in D.C. with Gary Condit and Chandra Levy and the murder mystery there. And so, I was thinking, is this really the news environment that I want it to work and are these are the types of stories I wanted to cover? And I had actually applied to law school, thinking I would go to law school. And then, unfortunately, September 11th happened just after summer. And everything else, as it has for so many people, changed after that moment because I literally went from being a desk assistant to starting to work in the investigative unit. Because I speak Arabic fluently, I started using my language skills.
I got sent overseas to be involved in some of the coverage initially of Afghanistan. And so, you know, you talked about some of the career milestone and everything throughout that point was defined by what was happening in the region. So, you know, I covered a little bit of the Afghanistan War. The following year, President Bush gave his famous Axis of Evil speech and it looked like the U.S. was about to invade Iraq. So, I left NBC to go work for CNN as a producer, and I ended up going to cover the Iraq War and its aftermath from 2003 until 2006 in the region. And then almost every year or two years, there has been either a major conflict or a huge story that has just taken me further and further along in the career.
Needless to say, I deferred law school. I never ended up going to law school. My mother still asks me if I’m ever going to go back to law school. I try to convince her, like, I think I’ve actually carved out a career now in journalism where I could stay in this for the long haul, but we’ll see.
On former President Donald Trump’s challenges to press freedom
What’s different, perhaps in the United States, is the institutions, and the laws are skewed towards protecting journalists to some extent. Although, you know, in recent years there’s been an erosion of that. But I think for the most part, the idea that journalists in this country are under attack by institutions is not the same, and it’s not right to compare it to other countries in the world where journalists are assassinated and killed and rounded up and tortured and abused.
Download the episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
