Exclusive: Ali Velshi on Trump and Biden, The Future of Media, and MSNBC’s Coverage of Israel-Hamas War

MSNBC’s Ali Velshi weighed in on the stakes of the 2024 election, what a second Donald Trump term could mean for journalists, and MSNBC’s coverage of Israel-Hamas war in a wide-ranging interview on Mediaite’s Press Club.

Velshi, whose career has taken him from CNN, where he served as a business anchor, to MSNBC, where he now hosts a four-hour stretch of weekend programming named Velshi, is out with a new book, Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. It’s a fascinating family history that traces the journey of his ancestors from India, to apartheid South Africa, then Kenya, and finally Canada, where Velshi was raised.

In this week’s episode of Press Club, Velshi discusses his book and what it told him about the current political climate with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin.

“He’s threatened capital punishment for the heads of our companies,” Velshi said of Trump’s threats against the press. “You don’t have to implement laws. All you have to do is scare enough journalists off.”

“Really good autocrats in history have been able to balance this line between things that they actually do — jailing people, rounding people up, and prosecuting them — with this idea of let the people take care of it,” he added. “Let people start to hate journalists and mistreat them and threaten them. And you might take care of the problem that way.”

Velshi also discussed his coverage of Oct. 7 and Israel’s war in Gaza, which was subjected to criticism early on. “In explaining why Hamas came to be, you have to explain the frustrations of the Palestinian people,” Velshi explained. “Context is not justification.”

Velshi addressed ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt, whom he has known for years, and who asked on Morning Joe in October if Hamas was writing the scripts for the network. “I was deeply disappointed that he would say such a thing,” Velshi said. “I’m not looking forward to a world where Jonathan Greenblatt and I aren’t moving towards the same goals, which is global understanding.”

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: You start your book with the time you got shot. By a rubber bullet, I should add, but that’s still no fun. For those who don’t know the story, could you walk us through what happened?

Ali Velshi: It was the Saturday after George Floyd had been killed. I’d been in Minneapolis because I cover these things often; the civil unrest, big stories domestically. It was unusual because I did have a bulletproof vest on, I was carrying a gas mask, which I have never done in this country before. I have that gear for other assignments that I go on. It was a very rough week, as you recall. There had been a police station that had been burned down. There were running confrontations between police and protesters.

But on the Saturday night, it wasn’t that way. And for some reason, in the middle of a very quiet march that that I was toward the back of, we were covering it, a police and National Guard came into the intersection in front of us and started shooting flashbangs and tear gas and rubber bullets.

The crowd largely separated and now there’s nobody between the police lines and my crew. They were shooting and they were doing these things and there was really nobody to shoot at that point. And my security guy was saying, “They’re shooting at us.”

So we were pulling back and as we were doing this live on TV, I took one to the knee. It’s one of those things that shocks you when it happens, so you’re running on adrenaline. I didn’t actually realize until much later that night that it had gone through my pants and my skin. And you’re right, it’s a rubber bullet, but that’s a rubber covered bullet. The whole thing was fascinating and not what I expected to be doing with my career at this point.

How painful is that?

I describe it as taking a hockey puck to the shin. The good news is it was in my shin, it was below my knee. A little higher and it can do real damage. That night, someone was shot in their eye and they lost their eyesight. The thing about a rubber bullet is if it gets you in a place that you can take it, you’re okay. It can be a very dangerous thing.

Did you sense that was an accident? Because there was a moment afterwards where you heard someone say something that led you to believe that maybe somebody was shooting at journalists there.

A couple of things happened. One is we retreated and we got to another intersection and something very similar happened. But there were no other people around. It was just us as journalists. It was a number of different press crews that were there trying to make their way back.

We yelled, “We’re media” and we put our hands up, not knowing whether the first thing was an accident or not, we wanted to make sure there wasn’t a second one. And someone yelled back, “We don’t care,” and started firing. Nobody got hit the second time.

But, I don’t know the answer to that. I think the truth might lie in the middle. When you shoot someone at that distance, you should be using a scope. We had a camera on my cameraman who is about six foot three. I think they knew we were media. And subsequent discovery has learned that that night there was some sense of the police going after after the media. But I don’t know the answer to that. And maybe one day I’ll find out.

Not something that you want to hear about or see in America.

Correct. That that’s not something we want to see or hear about. And as a viewer or listener or reader, you should never want that to happen. That shouldn’t have to do with any kind of politics or anything like that. You don’t want your media impeded. It is one of the remaining great things about our country. When you look at other countries, which I follow very closely, and their devolution, often media and the distribution of information, curtailing that is often one of the first steps. We just don’t want that to happen in America.

Trump has spoken about that moment frequently. Do you draw any connections between that incident and the atmosphere that Trump set at the top with regards to his treatment of the press?

I do. I’ll start by saying Trump’s rendition of this, which he used at a number of rallies that fall before the election, is much better than what actually happened. It’s quite theatrical. It’s quite good. And with each rally it got a little bit better. But there is a connection, right? It’s a permission structure. It has worked in other parts of the world, whether you’re talking about “the other” or you’re talking about immigrants, which are often a target, or you are talking about the media.

We’ve seen it in Rwanda. We’ve seen it in the Balkans. We certainly saw it in World War II, where once you dehumanize or otherize a group, it opens up a permission structure for people to act a certain way toward them. So I do think there was that overlap, that idea that the media are the enemy of the people, the media are the enemy of police.

Remember, that whole movement after George Floyd got killed, the Black Lives Matter movement, did feel to some people like it was people versus the police. And Donald Trump was taking a side. I don’t think that had to be a people versus police thing. I don’t think that good policing or good anything needs to be drawn along those lines.

But we are in a time, around the world and in America, where that’s what happens with every issue. Everybody’s got a hot take and they’ve got to take a position on it. In my view, good policing is an evolution. There are issues that we need to solve; some of that comes from training, some of that comes from what we spend on policing, some of that comes from community relations, some of it may be racism, but it’s nuanced and it’s complicated.

Donald Trump has a mastery for removing nuance from any topic, whether he’s right or wrong, whether he understands it or he doesn’t. So I think that in removing nuance from the idea that the media are the enemy of the people, you do create a permission structure to open the media up for attack, both rhetorically and and physically. And remember, that is just not something we grew up with understanding. The fact that you had a media badge or media cap or some sort of media identification was meant to protect you in all circumstances, everywhere in the world during civil conflict or during war. And that has been deteriorating for some years. Donald Trump, he didn’t start that, but he’s certainly riding that wave.

It’s something you hear about in Russia, we’re hearing about it now in India. Not something you expect to hear in the United States. With that in mind, we’re barreling towards the 2024 election. What do you think the stakes are for journalists if Trump is reelected? Is that something you worry about?

I think about it. Kash Patel, who’s a key Trump spokesperson who may have a cabinet position if Donald Trump becomes president, has said “We will go after journalists, civilly and criminally,” which I think is interesting. What you see in places like the ones you described, other parts of the world — two things. One is they do sometimes go after journalists criminally. This has happened to Maria Ressa in the Philippines, who has won a Nobel Prize for her work in terms of criticizing the government. We hear stories about it at the Committee to Protect Journalists, journalists who walk around their own countries always with a bulletproof vest because they’re worried about the government.

But the harassment is another department. It’s the idea that suddenly you’re getting audited or suddenly your family’s getting phone calls or threats. You don’t have to implement laws. You just have to scare enough journalists off, to say go cover something else. Go back to covering economics like I did, go cover sports, go cover cooking, or whatever the case is. Don’t cover us critically.

This fits into something that Donald Trump has been saying about going after his enemies. He uses the term retribution. “I am your retribution,” which sort of mocks what Mussolini said, “I’m your avenger.” So I do think about this.

I think if you fall into the category of critic, that might mean journalist, might be an opposition leader, might mean prosecutor, might mean witness, might mean juror, might mean anybody. I think there’s some threat that Donald Trump will come for you and the Trump administration will come for you.

I’m sure I’m going to get yelled at about this, but from what I recall, during the first Trump term, there was a lot of bluster about cracking down on the press. There wasn’t a lot of action. A guy sent pipe bombs to CNN of course. There were threats against journalists. But now we have Rachel Maddow who said, regarding the camps that Trump is talking about setting up for undocumented immigrants, who’s to say that journalists won’t be sent to those camps? Do you see it as a likelihood that the bluster that Trump has always shown on the campaign trail, and positioning networks like CNN, MSNBC as his opponents, could go beyond that and we could see concrete action taken against the press?

I think it’s it’s two distinct issues, and they’re important to distinguish. The first part, and Timothy Snyder from Yale talks about this, he’s the author of the book On Tyranny. Authoritarian experts discuss the fact that sometimes you don’t have to do the concrete stuff. You just have to put it out there. If you say enough times that the media is the enemy of the people, you’ll find enough people like the pipe bomb guy who say, let me take care of this myself because people have beef with media. Some of it’s legitimate.

And then there’s the actual stuff that you can do to try and silence the media, and that can be lawsuits. That can be Donald Trump has talked about taking away our license. We don’t have a license. We’re a cable TV channel. There’s no license. But he’s talked about capital punishment for the heads of our companies. So I don’t know.

I don’t know that you could get that far, but I don’t know that we should be trying that. This is the country where our First Amendment, not our 13th amendment, our First Amendment is about the establishment of state religion, the ability to peaceably demonstrate and freedom of the press. It is something we hold dear. There are parts of the world where that’s not primary. It is primary for us.

So I don’t know where one connects to the other. But I do think that this idea of engendering or encouraging stochastic violence because you tell people the media is the enemy might be all the danger you need. And really good autocrats in history have been able to balance this line between things that they actually do; jailing people, rounding people up, and prosecuting them with this idea of let the people take care of it. Let people start to hate journalists and mistreat them and threaten them. And you might take care of the problem that way.

January 6 is a good example of that. Trump didn’t need to storm the Capitol. He just needed to tell his supporters that the election was stolen. Fragility of social fabric is a theme that courses through your book. From your family moving to South Africa and experiencing apartheid, fighting against it and leaving South Africa in a place where the country was worse off than when they when they arrived, to no fault of their own, of course. Do you think that we take for granted the stability that we have in the United States? And was that something that alarmed you when you were reporting out this book?

Yes, 100%. And that sort of ties to that that opening chapter. I think we do take it for granted. My book talks a lot about the responsibilities of citizenship and the idea that being cynical about politics is a luxury that exists with people who have never had to live outside of a political system, or without a political system. If you’ve been outside, if you haven’t had a political system, as my parents did not enjoy growing up, you crave it. You want it. It’s blustery, it’s noisy, it’s frustrating. It’s a lot of things. But it is actually our responsibility.

The responsibility of citizenship is not just simply voting. Or as I write in my book, jury duty. That’s the basics. That’s the price of admission. It is looking at your country and saying, how do I leave this thing better than I found it? And if there are fissures, if there are rips in the fabric, it’s on me to try and fix them, little ones, in ways that I can. You can’t fix the whole world. The world feels like a boiling pot right now. Dried kindling perhaps, where if somebody throws a match, lots of things can go wrong. And in a lot of parts of the world, things are going wrong.

I do think that we have the ability to keep democracy on track in the United States. But I think we have to accept the fact that democracy, because it exists, doesn’t just sustain itself. It takes work and input by us, the citizens, and that is the responsibility we’ve got to take seriously.

What do you make of the way the Biden administration is handling the war in Gaza? This is an issue you’ve covered — Israel and Palestine — on your MSNBC show for years now.

I will start by saying this is a decades long problem that if there were an easy solution, we’d have arrived at one already. I’m surprised at how long it took the Biden administration to come around to the fact that this is a brushfire that’s out of control. I think they want the right thing to happen. I think they desperately want a deal. I think they understand that a deal is not going to happen between Hamas and Israel without America.

I think they fully understand that the two main parties to this, the Israeli government and Hamas, have a remarkable disincentive to come to a deal. It literally will probably end Netanyahu’s presidency, which may result in him going to jail. And it probably will be the end of, at least the political leaders, of Hamas.

Now, I don’t think the movement ends because it’s a movement that’s been around essentially since the ’20s and ’30s, for 100 years. I think a lot of people are disappointed in the degree to which the United States has let this thing get to where it is right now, this idea that we built a pier, when in fact we supply Israel with most of the weaponry.

So we should have the leverage to be able to say, hey guys, we’re going to tie one to the other if it doesn’t happen. I think a lot of people are disappointed in the Biden administration. I would say two things. One is I think they’re trying to fix it, and if they fix it, fix it means do we have something that looks like peace and security for Israelis and possibly a state for the Palestinians, that might help. And I think the other thing to think about is if you don’t like how Joe Biden handled it, I’m not sure you’re going to see a better result with Donald Trump.

What do you think of Americans who, despite recognizing that Trump would be worse on the issue than Biden, are just saying I cannot support someone like Joe Biden, given his support for Israel, and so they’re going to sit this this election out.

We have a binary system, right? [Sitting out is] not a thing in America. I think the people who registered their displeasure with Joe Biden during the primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin, in places like that, in great numbers, were participating in the democratic process. They were sending a message to say, I’m here, I’m a citizen, I’m still engaged, and I’m very unhappy with the way you’ve done this. And I’m not voting for the other guy. I’m just letting you know I’m upset. So I’m giving you a clue and an opportunity to do something about it.

I think you can’t sit elections out. I think it’s irresponsible. I would love it if people were automatically registered, and I don’t know if I want to say compelled to vote, but certainly encouraged to vote. I’d be all about giving people incentives to do the right thing. I don’t think sitting out elections is a good idea anyway, but I also think we have a binary system.

If you don’t like the candidates, I get it, but that’s who the candidates are. Get involved. I meet young legislators from around this country all the time. There are some fascinating, amazing people who are out there. Sometimes they’re in state legislatures, sometimes they’re in Congress. I can imagine them being president. I think they’d be amazing. This is a country of 340 million people. We can fix that problem a little later on.

What we can’t fix is if we lose democracy. So that’s my large message to people. Israel and Gaza might be your biggest issue. Climate might be your biggest issue. There might be something else, and they are important. I get pushback when I say that because people say to me, so basically, the thing that I care most about, you’re just going to dismiss. You’re not validating that.

That’s not true. I do validate the people who have frustrations, but your choice is Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It’s not RFK Jr. It’s not Jill Stein. It’s not these other people. It’s these two people. And that’s the choice you have. I’m sorry for some people that it’s not a better choice. I’m not 100% sure that you’re ever going to get a presidential candidate who shares your views on all the important aspects of society. I think the answer to that is get involved in politics.

You said in a recent interview that most coverage of Israel and Gaza feels like reading a book and starting at the final chapter. What did you mean by that?

I think it’s got to do with these hot takes that we have on things. People know a little bit and make a decision, whether they’re influenced by their friends or their classmates or their workplace or their families. This is that complicated. I’ve been to Israel, I’ve been inside Gaza, I’ve been in the West Bank. I’ve covered this story for a long time, and I don’t know enough about it. Same thing with Russia and Ukraine. I’ve been covering that story for a long time.

But to really, really understand it, you have to read a lot. You have to read, then you have to read another book. And I wish we could all stop and say, this seems very complicated. I didn’t know until October 7th that you had to be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. I existed as both for my entire life. But I think we’re in a society that’s so polarized that we have to make a decision, and somebody gives you something very small to read, and you have no ability to know what the context is on that.

This is a long story. And the reality is that both sides of this issue in Israel and Palestine have valid grievances and concerns. And to put it all on one side, or to suggest that it’s easily solved is to not understand the issue. So my main hope is that people don’t read from the last chapter, they just read more. And they try and understand and they talk to more people. I haven’t seen in my 30 years in this business a greater lack of empathy than I have in the last eight months or so on this particular topic.

What do you mean specifically?

The need to take a position that cannot recognize that you can hold two thoughts at the same time. We’re not squirrels. We can actually hold the thought that 1948, the formation of the State of Israel, was something that was desperately needed by a population that had been literally almost decimated, deliberately, under the bright lights of the world. And the world didn’t save them.

So if you were Jewish, you’re sitting here thinking, I’m going to have to save myself. We’re going to have to have a place where we can defend ourselves. And that’s a reality.

And on that same day that state created one of the best moments in Jewish history, other people lost their homes. And for them, it is a catastrophe. They’re not in conflict with each other. Those two things really happened, and things have stemmed from that, and there’s been a lot of bad faith on both sides of this issue. There have been a lot of bad actors, there have been a lot of incapable actors, and that’s why we are where we are.

You simply cannot start by saying “X” happened on October 7th, and that’s why “Y” must happen. What happened on October 7th was terrible. I covered it that morning, and then I left that afternoon for Israel. It was terrible. I spoke to families of the hostages who had been held. I spoke to one young man, who was convinced his mother was a hostage and turned out her body was so badly decomposed, they couldn’t identify her. This is the worst story in the world. It doesn’t mean we can’t have empathy for everybody on all sides of this — in particular, civilians in war.

That’s the one thing I learned in Ukraine with Russia. You’ll never hear me talk about Russians. I’ll always talk about the Vladimir Putin administration, the Putin government, the Russian government, because ordinary Russians didn’t cause this war. Ordinary Palestinians, ordinary Israelis did not cause this war. They should not be held prisoner. They should not be dying as a result of it.

You took some heat for your coverage on October 7. What do you think of that criticism?

I thought our coverage that morning had remarkable context and information. One of the things I’m quite used to as part of my job is that I am often on air when something is breaking, or I get sent to something that is breaking. In other words, we don’t have a lot of information. We had that morning a very small set of facts. So all you can do when you’re on TV for three hours while the story is breaking, but you don’t have confirmations and you don’t have facts, is you can create context. That’s what I’ve done in every other story all my life, and it is what I will continue to do in every story. I will always bring you context when we don’t have any hard information.

I was surprised at the number of people who actually posted things to say, this is not a time for context. There is no context here. Because in my reality, there’s no issue in which the context is not relevant or important. Doesn’t matter how mad you are at somebody, it doesn’t matter what you think of the situation, doesn’t matter what you think the outcome is. This is not a topic my audience studies from a day to day basis. So when it happens, we have to talk about it and we have to create the context. Again, same thing with Russia and Ukraine. I had to describe NATO, why it was formed, the Warsaw Pact, why it was formed, when they started, when they ended, what all the deals were. So that when you’re discussing it, you have a proper context in which to frame it. That’s what we were doing on the morning of October 7th.

Now, some people were in WhatsApp groups where they were getting more information faster than we were. As a news organization, we can’t put that on TV. If I get a WhatsApp that says something, it has to go through a process in which we can try and confirm it. So I wouldn’t have done things differently because I didn’t have better information to give. And I think it’s something people have to understand, that they may think they’ve got better information on their phone. I don’t have the ability to to do that.

I had left, I was in Israel by the next morning. Had I been there the next day, the coverage would have looked very different because I would have had a lot more information. But all we knew at the time was that Hamas had broken through, they had launched lots and lots of rockets. Which is interesting in and of itself, because often Hamas launches rockets that don’t make it over the Gaza border.

So the idea that they had launched as many rockets as they had and they had penetrated the Iron Dome system, but we had to talk about who is Hamas, what’s Gaza, what are the conditions in Gaza? And I was doing it with one of the only other guys, we don’t have a lot in our network, who have spent time in Gaza, Ayman Mohyeldin. So we were creating context, and it came across to some people as an academic conversation creating context around a breaking news situation in which we were avoiding fact. We just didn’t have a lot of facts in those early hours.

I suppose you would say there’s a difference between adding context to a story — in the same way that people would give context to Israeli strikes in Gaza and explain those are in response to October 7th — and providing argument that excuses something like that.

Correct. And there was no work that we did that excused, supported Hamas. It was simply explanations of it. But in explaining why Hamas came to be, you have to explain the frustrations of the Palestinian people. And in explaining that, you have to explain the failures of Israel and the Palestinians to come to a meaningful peace over and over again. It’s not support. It’s simply context. Context is not justification.

Jonathan Greenblatt appeared on Morning Joe and asked if the scripts at MSNBC were being written by Hamas. What did you think of that?

It’s what I told Jonathan Greenblatt. I’ve known him for a long time. We’ve been friends. I was deeply disappointed that he would say such a thing. He knows me, knows my story personally, knows the context of my story, and he knows what I do. I think things like that are irresponsible.

But he knows that. He knows I think so. He knows lots of people think so. And he’s chosen to go down this road. He could be a very, very helpful voice in this conversation. The ADL has traditionally been a very helpful voice in understanding statistics and trends around racism and inequality in this country. I don’t think that’s what he and they are doing right now, but that’s a matter that they can take up and hopefully will organize.

Did he apologize or explain himself in any way?

We had a good dialogue. I wouldn’t characterize it as an apology. We spoke because we’ve had a longstanding relationship. We’re probably due or overdue for a real conversation. That’s going to take a while. Okay. But I’m willing to have it. I hope he is too.

The problem is, October 7th had the result of hardening hearts. And I live in a world where it’s never going to get better when you harden hearts. It may happen, but we’re going to have to soften hearts again in order to come to a deal. The day there’s a deal between Israel and Hamas, there are going to be a whole lot of people who think that everybody compromised too much and gave away too much. But that’s the nature of of deals and compromises. We are going to have to have people who sit around a table who are going to be able to validate people on the other side, whether or not they agree with them. They might even hate them. And that’s just the world in which we have to operate.

I’m not looking forward to a world in which Jonathan Greenblatt and I are not moving toward the same goals, which is global understanding. Understanding amongst different people and this fight of anti-Semitism. It’s a real thing. We all need to be together in fighting it. And this rise in Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian sentiment, all of these things are bad, and all of the victims of them are not people who deserve it. So I would just like to hopefully be part of a softening of hearts on this one.

There was some reporting at the time that MSNBC had benched you, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Mehdi Hasan, who has now left the network. Was that true?

I think some of the reporting didn’t understand some of the, particularly with me, my circumstances.

You went to Israel.

Right, I was there. I was off my show the next morning because I was in transit. We couldn’t go to Tel Aviv, we had to go to Amman. And so we didn’t get into Israel until what would have been Sunday afternoon, U.S. time. So I couldn’t have been on TV, but I was on TV reporting for the course of the week.

I don’t know what the other guys’ schedules were, but we’re typically on the weekends, so the point is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we’re not typically on, so I don’t know. I read a lot of reporting about what was going on behind the scenes, and I still don’t know what the truth was. But I was on TV a great deal during that week, probably 50 or 60 times before I got back the next weekend.

You had an exchange with Ritchie Torres on Twitter after he denied that there are checkpoints in Israel that separate Jews and Muslims. You had a personal experience there. What happened?

Yeah, he was talking about Hebron in particular. And I will say this, that when talking about Israel and the separations and the unequal things that happen, you have to stipulate there are few things going on. There are Arab citizens of Israel. They have a different set of rights than Palestinians in the West Bank have, who have a different set of rights than people in Gaza had. None of them enjoy absolute equal rights in Israel.

But in the West Bank, in particular, in Hebron, it is a place in which there are streets on which Israelis can walk and Palestinians cannot walk, streets in which Israelis can be in a vehicle and that Palestinians can’t. And I was subject to that. I tried to get into the Tomb of the Patriarchs. And the soldier stopped me and asked me if I’m Jewish. And I said, do I need to answer that? And he said, yeah. And he said, if you’re not Jewish, you’re not going here. I said, why, what’s the prohibition? He said he didn’t have to give me a reason. And there is agency given to the soldiers on the spot to make certain decisions like that.

So I didn’t go. I wasn’t able to go by virtue of the fact that I’m not Jewish or I wouldn’t identify myself as Jewish. I thought that was a weird thing. And I come from a place where decisions aren’t made on the basis of what your religion or skin color is. And my point to Ritchie Torres is his information was incorrect. It’s just incorrect. I’ve been there, and if he were to go there, he may find the same thing. I don’t know where he got his information from and he had posted a lot of things like that. I don’t know where he got that. Everybody and anybody who has gone to Hebron understands one thing, and that is it is a fully segregated city.

When you were reporting on Apartheid in South Africa for this book, did you register similarities between South Africa and Israel today?

Yeah. If you go to the West Bank, Palestinians live in their cities. They have a different license plate than Israelis. You can’t drive your Palestinian car on certain highways. So if you’re a Palestinian making your way from one point in the West Bank to the other, you are subject to checkpoints, you’re subject to slower roads. You can’t go certain places. Some places are entirely off limits to you.

The map of the places that Palestinians have control over their their lives in the West Bank, it looks like Swiss cheese. People think that this side is Israel and this side is the West Bank. It’s just not true. This side is Israel and this side is Swiss cheese. Which is exactly what they did in South Africa. They’d have these Bantustans, sort of fake places that people weren’t really from, but they were, in theory, thought of as independent places where they had control over their own situation.

Remember that even in the West Bank, there isn’t really full control. A lot of young Palestinians think that the Palestinian Authority is the security apparatus for the Israeli government in the West Bank. They do not have foreign policy control. They don’t have airspace control. They don’t have border crossing control. So that’s what you have to think about, is what is control? What is independence? What is self-determination? What does it look like?

People get very upset by the references to Apartheid and I don’t wish to, as I said, to harden hearts further. And I don’t wish to pour gasoline on the topic. But people do have to understand that Palestinians live as second or third class citizens in their own home in the West Bank.

I want to talk about your career. You started at CNN and on September 11th, 2001, they needed you on the ground in New York City. And you drove a motorcycle from Canada to New York. What happened?

So I was supposed to arrive on September 7th, Friday. And, there was just a little visa issue. It wasn’t anything serious. It was a processing issue and I’d been abroad. I landed at JFK. They said we can’t process you, you’d have to enter the US as a resident. As a Canadian, you can always enter the U.S. as a visitor. But you can’t come here to start work. But they said it’ll take a couple of days. So on Monday, September the 10th, I was on with the immigration people and the lawyers, and they said, small matter probably will be sorted out in the morning. And it was sorted out on Tuesday morning, September 11th. My visa was stamped that morning. Clearly by somebody who was not aware that something else was going on.

Now, the old process was the visa was processed in Vermont for me. I guess that’s where they processed Visas for Canadians. It would be FedExed to CNN’s lawyers. They’d do the necessary signatures and FedEx it to me in Toronto. But there were no planes. There were no rental cars available because every last American had taken one. There was no way to get to the U.S.

So I finally, with the help of the U.S. consulate in in Toronto, with whom I had had some dealings as a reporter, they figured out a way to get a faxed copy of my Visa. And the rule on that day was the person running the border crossing makes the decisions. They knew the person running the border at Niagara Falls, and they said, he’s on shift until midnight. If you can get there, he’s agreed to let you in. And so all I had left was this motorcycle, which I was not going to bring to the United States. It was a 750 cc motorcycle. And I rode it to the border, crossed, spent the night in Niagara Falls, and then rode the bike into to New York to get working.

And CNN kept calling me, and I said, I can’t get there. And their view, and this was my first day of work, was we don’t care. You need to be at work. Like just get there. And it’s an ethos that I’ve lived with. That when you got to cover the news, it’s nobody else’s problem what the logistics are, just solve them.

You were then a business anchor at CNN for years. Why did you leave CNN for Al Jazeera?

So when as I was doing more and more business reporting, I was doing more and more international business reporting. In fact, I had a role at CNN in the U.S., and I had a role with CNN international. The show that I did, by the way, was produced out of Hong Kong and London. There were three anchors.

And as I traveled the world, people kept saying, could you guys do more like Al Jazeera does. And I didn’t really know what that meant. So I started studying what Al Jazeera English was doing around the world and was quite impressed by their reach, their commitment, their resources, the ability to really put people into stories, particularly under-covered stories. And then they decided to open up an operation in the United States. And I had the opportunity to go work for them. And it was it was really remarkably fruitful. It was three years in totality, but half a year was ramping up and half a year was ramping down. So it was two years. I really enjoyed it.

It was not a well managed operation in the United States. And they had issues with branding that the company wasn’t fully willing to deal with, and that is that their logo was this beautiful Arabic script, which looked a whole lot like ISIS’ logo at the time. And people couldn’t get past that. So that happened. But I learned a lot. I reported in a different fashion, and I work with a lot of the same people I worked with before, that are now at NBC, who were at CNN. And they all agree that those two and a half, three years were formative for me. They were a moment of growth. Some of that was Al Jazeera, some of that is sometimes you just have to do it. You just have to go somewhere else. I’d been at CNN for 12 years. I loved it and I had grown a lot, but I needed something else and I got it.

Al Jazeera is now getting a lot of scrutiny. It’s funded by the Qatari royal family, and it’s a soft power tool for the monarchy. Critics dismiss Al Jazeera and people that have worked there as somehow being influenced by —

Or sympathetic to —

Sympathetic to. What do you make of that criticism?

It’s definitely soft power, there’s no question. It’s probably the most important thing Qatar has done until recent years, where they become the main mediator for hostages or global conflicts. I’ve rarely seen anybody use media as effectively because they created a global English speaking platform. As far as sympathies go, I have affinity for CNN, I worked there for a long time, but I don’t have sympathies for them or toward them. I used to do stories about people cutting the cord, and I’m sure the bosses didn’t like that cause it was a cable company at the time.

At Al Jazeera, I interviewed people about human rights abuses in building the soccer stadiums, and the fact that it’s not a democracy. It was a force behind some of the Arab Spring democratic movements. And that was really annoying to a lot of their Arab neighbors saying, you people don’t have a democracy. What are you doing fanning the flames of democracy in our countries?

And the same thing with NBC. We can have affinity. We can like where we work and at the same time fully understand that I work for corporate media. They have other interests. They have interests that sometimes don’t dovetail with my own. That’s fine.

But my job with Al Jazeera, it was transactional. In fact, I had an agreement with them: generally speaking, don’t phone me and I won’t phone you. But I said, I want to be able to say in interviews, as I am doing today, for the rest of eternity, you didn’t interfere with any of my stories. You didn’t guide my coverage, and you never told me what to cover and what not cover.

You had full editorial freedom?

Yes.

People that you know that worked at Al Jazeera have had full editorial freedom?

I just generally don’t like to speak for other people’s deals. But in my particular case, I was 100% sure that that would be the day it ends. If you attempt to have me cover a story that I wasn’t going to cover, not cover a story I was going to cover, or color the way I cover a story, that’ll be the end of our relationship.

That was an agreement I had. They stayed with it. I stayed with it. I think in instances like this where you work with state-paid-for media, and again, this could apply to the CBC in Canada or the BBC. There’s a lot of state-owned media around the world. You just have to know what the distinction is between a robust editorial conversation and interference from outside the organization. That distinction was always clear to me.

There was this rather ridiculous report in the Free Beacon about how a number of reporters on the Washington Post’s foreign desk had previously worked at Al Jazeera. One of them, Louisa Loveluck, who was the Post’s Baghdad bureau chief, had written one story for Al Jazeera. I thought it was silly that there’s this assumption that you are somehow stained if you worked there.

But I come from Canada, where, again, when you understand that there is, in some places, a role for the state or the government in the funding of media because you cover stories that are not covered. Maybe I have a slightly different level of comfort with it. In America, we generally think that’s a bad thing. We don’t seem to be troubled by the idea that media in America is often controlled by corporate interests that are aligned with political interests. There seems to be a weird line that if the government’s involved, it’s really a problem.

I don’t necessarily share that view. I do share the view that governments who own media should really understand where the wall is, where the line is between the government and its interests and the media organization. The heads of those organizations should know, this is a line and this is not an appropriate one. But given that I believe that journalists should be critical of their countries and everybody else’s countries, as long as they’re not stopping you from doing that, I’m not worried about it.

You were a business anchor for CNN, you’re a business correspondent for NBC News. What do you think about the state of the media industry? Are you optimistic about its future?

Hopeful. Not optimistic necessarily for a couple of reasons. One is our financial structure is changing. So I think we all understand distribution is all digital now or is going to be all digital fairly soon. We are still quite robust in the cable distribution side of things, but it doesn’t get bigger on a yearly basis.

For now, the money’s there.

Right. Because you can you can garner money against every subscriber, every cable subscriber. It’s not clear how you do that on the digital side. You have much more experience in that than I do. We’ve got the eyeballs. We know people will watch our brand or the major news brands, but the structure of making money out of that is entirely different than what we’re used to. We are big legacy organizations with big legal teams, with big infrastructure, with big standards and practices departments. And that’s all important.

I don’t know how we make that transition into the new world in a place where lots of people trust legacy media a lot less. And that’s part of the problem. We are spitting into the wind here. We have fewer subscribers. I think when I started in the business, there were 110 million households that subscribed to cable. I think we’re around 50-ish. Maybe it’s dropped. And it’s going to keep on dropping.

The age of the audience is increasing, so I don’t know, from a financial perspective, how this goes forward. Once the finances stop working, that means you pay people less money, which means they make other choices. Should I be a journalist? It’s a hard job. You’re coming under criticism. I could do something else and make more money.

That’s where the fear comes in for me. How do we incentivize people to remain journalists? How do we continue to incentivize real journalism? When I say journalism, I mean bearing witness. Bearing witness involves being places. That’s expensive and then taking the information you have, because you’ve borne witness, and you’ve got video, and you’ve seen what’s actually going on, and then holding power to account because you have that information. That’s all we’re supposed to be doing. But that first part, the bearing witness, is costly. The second part we can do because you can gather information that other people have and you can hold power to account, but someone’s actually got to gather that information. Someone’s actually got to get to the grounds that they’re talking to, not just princes and prime ministers and leaders, but regular people and gleaning their experience. It’s the most interesting part of my job. It’s also the most expensive.

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