Media reporter Maxwell Tani at Semafor reports MSNBC has quietly taken three of its Muslim broadcasters "out of the anchor’s chair" since the vicious Hamas attack on Israel last Saturday "amid America’s wave of sympathy for Israeli terror victims."
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. Two network sources with knowledge of the plans told Semafor that the network also plans to have Alicia Menendez fill in this upcoming weekend for Ali Velshi, a third Muslim-American host who on Sunday interviewed a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.
Tani reported some staff at MSNBC have been concerned by the moves, feeling "all three hosts have some of the deepest knowledge of the conflict." NBC says the shifts are "coincidental," and the three continue to appear on air to report and provide analysis.
There's also some dishy material about email conflict after an NBC producer organized a support session for Israel with a rabbi. A Velshi producer protested: “There’s no Palestinian representation at this?”
“This is not about Palestinians and Jews/Israelis,” the organizer said, tagging NBC’s HR director. “This is about terrorists and Jews/Israelis. Anyone entering this group needs to denounce terror and what happened on Saturday. Claims of ‘freedom fighting,’ rationalizations, really, anything not explicitly and unequivocally about being supportive during this difficult time; these do NOT belong here.”
Velshi’s producer said that the employee had sent them a private message including some “incredibly offensive things.”
Tani analyzed the conservative media criticism of the al-Jazeera veterans and concluded "The criticism of the three MSNBC hosts — three of the most high-profile Muslim on-air personalities on the network— seems vastly disproportionate to anything they’ve said on air." He seems to be missing the punditry we pointed out on Friday. Like Mohyeldin just spooning up the Hamas spin on Velshi's show: "Hamas is saying, well, if nobody is able to defend, what is happening for Palestinians in the west bank or east Jerusalem, with the home demolitions, the arrests, the children being killed, the desecration of holy sites, if they’re unable to do that, then we only have the ability to do it with military might and crude weapons and military.”
Or Velshi putting on a Palestinian pundit to say "I really want to caution your viewers not to be dragged into the good guy vs bad guy equation. We have to look at the bigger picture.”
It's not "vastly disproportionate" to suggest these guys sound like they're still broadcasting on Al-Jazeera.
