Mehdi Hasan has announced Zeteo UK
Mehdi Hasan announced today that he is bringing his media brand, Zeteo, to the UK. In a typically understated launch video, he declared: “I’m back”.
Along with the bombastic tone, another thing leapt out to me about that video. There is a segment shot in a moving car, clearly in London, in which Hasan does not seem to be wearing a seatbelt. I’ve tweeted asking him about this and am happy to be proven otherwise. Being in a moving vehicle without a seatbelt is illegal. Lancashire Police fined then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for doing it whilst shooting a social media video back in 2023.
Anyway, Hasan’s Substack-based leftie news outlet is now in the UK. He’s brought some friends with him, too. The not-so-surprising list of comrades includes Sangita Myska, Owen Jones, Grace Blakeley, Afua Hirsch, and Peter Oborne. The most significant hire, though, is Shehab Khan, a well-established Lobby journalist from his time at ITV News.
In his post revealing the soft-launch, Hasan said:
In the United States, independent journalism has exploded, reaching millions of people who no longer defer to establishment media gatekeepers… There is no reason Britain cannot follow America’s lead (at least in this one positive trend!). No reason we cannot build a media landscape that is more fearless, more accountable, and more willing to speak truth to power.
Mehdi Hasan Launches Zeteo UK
This is not a sentence I expect to write often, but… Mehdi Hasan is right. It’s what I’m trying to do with The Addition, albeit through the prism of culture, media and sport, not straight-down-the-line politics. Whether it’s The Free Press, Semafor or, yes, even Zeteo, America is streets ahead of us. We need to catch up.
Hasan himself is a controversial figure. Back in 2019, when an Al Jazeera host, he had to apologise for remarks made in his 20s. As The Wrap reported, he had, compared “non-Muslims and atheists to ‘cattle’ and included ‘homosexuals’ in a long list of behaviors and categories which he said argued were transgressive of Islam.” Nice.
Apologising, Hasan said:
I have always regretted the dumb and offensive comments I made in my 20s, on atheism and homosexuality. They still embarrass me, but they haven’t been representative of my beliefs for over a decade.
More recently, he deleted a post in which he said the supposed genocide in Gaza is “worse than… even the Holocaust.” (His full remarks are reported here.)
The British media landscape needs shaking up. I’m just not sure it’s Mehdi Hasan and Zeteo UK that I want doing it.
About the Author
