Mehdi to Media: Say ‘Genocide’ Without Melting Down
Zeteo’s editor-in-chief addresses elite media summit in Washington, DC, calls out media bias and softball interviews.
Semafor held its “Innovating to Restore Trust in News” summit in Washington, DC, last week.
High-profile speakers included Joe Kahn, executive editor of the New York Times, Mark Thompson, CEO of CNN, Brendan Carr, the Trump-supporting chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly, and also… Zeteo’s very own CEO and editor-in-chief.
In conversation onstage with Semafor’s media editor Max Tani, Mehdi explained how Zeteo now has almost 400,000 subscribers on Substack and nearly 700,000 subscribers on YouTube – all in less than a year!
He explained how he no longer has to worry about any kind of censorship or restrictions on his speech, and he pointed to mainstream media coverage of the Middle East as an example of how US journalists tend to pull their punches.
“A word like ‘genocide’ scares a lot of people,” Mehdi told Max. “I think given that Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, multiple Holocaust historians, have all said ‘genocide’ I think it’s worth more of our media people willing to say the G-word without having a meltdown.”
He also defended his style of adversarial journalism and combative interviewing style.
“The reason I think I have been successful in the US, and I did come out of nowhere 10 years ago and people liked what I did, is because the trust deficit existed around the existing form of interviews,” Mehdi said, adding: “If you stick to interviews, everywhere I go people are fed up of Sunday morning shows. They’re fed up of the kind of coziness between interviewers, anchors, and guests. They’re fed up of the lack of a follow-up question.”
Watch Mehdi’s full interview with Max above, in which he also addressed declining trust in the media; the failure of the New York Times to platform left-wing voices on its opinion pages; Joy Reid’s departure from MSNBC; and more.
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Awesome Mehdi!!
you’re a king, Mehdi 👑 thank you for your work!