MSNBC has quietly taken three of its Muslim broadcasters out of the anchor’s chair since Hamas’s 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.
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.
A company official vehemently pushed back against any notion that either Hasan or Mohyeldin were being sidelined in any way. Over the past several days, Mohyeldin has appeared on several programs on MSNBC as a guest including shows hosted by Reid and Chris Hayes. While he did not host Reid’s show, a network official said that the cable channel opted to stick with its more recognizable weekday hosts rather than hand over the reins to weekend anchors. Hasan’s Peacock show is taped, and the network official said his show was shelved in favor of keeping coverage on the NBC streaming service more up-to-date.
“We have and will continue to cover the barbaric terrorist attacks on defenseless civilians in Israel last weekend and the tragic war it has provoked thoroughly and in all their dimensions,” NBCUniversal Executive Vice President of Communications Stephen Labaton said in a statement.
The moves come as MSNBC — like the Democratic Party with which it’s often aligned — has swung into intense solidarity with the Jewish state after the murderous Hamas attacks. That shift has come with heated internal and external objections to anything that breaks with that solidarity, and has come with social media criticism of Hasan, Mohyeldin, and Velshi. Hasan has also been vocal on X, formerly known as Twitter, condemning the Hamas attack and calling attention to the plight of civilians in Gaza.
