MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan called for media outlets to not cover both sides of what he called “major issues” during a Wednesday forum.
“There are two words we need to remove from our media vocabulary right now and that is ‘both sides,’” Hasan told Semafor’s Ben Smith, a former New York Times reporter, in a video posted on Twitter and YouTube. “This fundamental crutch, this reliance on ‘both sides’ as a kind of lazy way of covering our political moment is deeply dangerous.”
“There are a bunch of major issues on which there are not both sides,” Hasan continued. “There are not both sides on climate change. There are not both sides on white supremacy. There are not both sides to democracy. Ben, there are not both sides on the Holocaust.”
Hasan referenced comments by an administrator at the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, in October 2021 that said students should learn opposing views about the Holocaust.
“That’s not what the bill says,” Republican State Sen. Bryan Hughes of Texas, who wrote the legislation that required providing contradictory views on controversial issues, told NBC at the time.
“On the big issues of our time, on whether people should be able to vote, on whether they should be able to get to a ballot box, on whether one party should be able to overturn elections, no there are not both sides,” Hasan said.
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