Zeteo founder and noted terrorism apologist Mehdi Hasan is struggling to find advertisers for his company and drops tens of thousands of dollars on defamation insurance, the host told an audience in New York City Wednesday.
Hasan made the admission during remarks at the Status News conference, a staid progressive media coffee klatch that charged full-paying attendees $750 to watch conversations with liberal media executives whom Status also covers—ostensibly objectively—in its media newsletter, which charges $15 a month.
One of the conference’s main sponsors was Planned Parenthood, which got its name on the wifi for the venue—inside the New York Times building—with the password Care4All.
Status founder and event moderator Oliver Darcy—who frequently scolds his competitors and news organizations he covers about conflicts of interest—made no reference to any conflicts of his own during his chats with Hasan and other liberal media luminaries. Among the summit sponsors lining Darcy’s pockets were the media platform Beehiiv, which hosts Status, and talent agency William Morris Endeavor, which represents Darcy.
“You spend quite a lot of money on defamation insurance, and I’m assuming that cost has only gone up,” Darcy said to Hasan, prompting an affirmative response.
“It’s a lot. It’s a lot. It’s more than tens of thousands,” Hasan added.
The virulently anti-Israel TV host, whose low-rated and inflammatory MSNBC show was canceled shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, has made attacks on Israel, including near-constant smears about “genocide,” a mainstay of Zeteo, which he said has made many advertisers skittish.
“I think the biggest issue for us when we started was, of course, a lot of the coverage we were doing in 2024 was of the genocide in the run up to election. Not a lot of people want to advertise against the content about genocide. Not a lot of people want to advertise against quote-unquote divisive, polarizing, controversial issues. So that becomes an issue, of course, for big blue chip advertisers,” Hasan said.
Later on in the program, Darcy revealed he too was dropping significant cash on defamation insurance.
“We have defamation insurance,” Darcy said during a conversation with his former CNN colleague Kaitlan Collins. “We have purchased as much defamation insurance as possible. So we spend a lot of money on that.”
Hasan is also a noted plagiarist and has compared non-Muslims and atheists to “cattle” and included “homosexuals” in a list of behaviors deviant to Islam, alongside pedophilia—something that also may give sponsors pause.
In addition to Hasan, the program also featured the disgraced news personality Brian Williams, who was bounced from the NBC Nightly News anchor chair and demoted to MSNBC with a giant pay cut in 2015 after he was exposed for decades of making up tall tales of his journalistic heroism.
Darcy, who once worked for the liberal media scold Brian Stelter at CNN, introduced Williams as “the last great anchorman.” Podcast host Kara Swisher used her appearance to lob broadsides at various tech and media executives.
She blasted Shark Tank cohost Kevin O’Leary as “that moron,” accused Jeff Bezos of “destroying” the Washington Post, attacked CBS owner David Ellison as a “nepo mogul,” and said Elon Musk was “in need of mental help.” At no point was she ever pressed by a giggling Darcy to explain her claims.
Other anti-Trump bloviators who took the stage to criticize conservative media included fired CNN star Don Lemon, who said unflattering things about CNN’s lonely conservative analyst, Scott Jennings, and MS NOW personality Nicolle Wallace, who called conservative media “propaganda arms” of the Trump administration and predicted Tucker Carlson will run for president.
The hours-long conference—which was filled with denunciations of President Donald Trump, conservatives, and CBS News chief Bari Weiss, whom Darcy routinely rants against on his podcast—featured a meltdown by famously Trump-despising New Yorker editor David Remnick, who said the United States now reminds him of the Soviet Union, which he covered as a Washington Post reporter in the 1980s.
“I lived in what was called the Soviet Union for four years, and I saw what happens to a society politically, culturally, spiritually when truth is denied it,” he warned.
Like Swisher, Remnick savaged Bezos, saying the billionaire’s “behavior” as the Washington Post‘s owner “is unforgivable. I don’t know how he lives with himself.”
Though censorship was a recurring theme of the many panels, not a single conservative voice was represented among the participants.
Darcy himself began life in conservative media. While working for The Blaze, he produced such headlines as “‘Allah Is a Lie!’ ‘Muhammad Is a Pedophile!'” and “Parents Infuriated After Teacher Reads Graphic, ‘Highly Inappropriate’ Gay Sex Poem to Students.”
He also regularly earned clicks by attacking CNN. “CNN Conducts 12 Minute Interview With Susan Rice & Doesn’t Ask Her About Benghazi,” he published in September 2013.
When Swisher called people who remain on X “grotesque,” likening them to Nazis, she earned a smattering of applause from audience members.
Rebecca Kutler, the MS NOW boss, said in an onstage interview that the network has no ban on Hasan Piker.
“Mr. Piker would like to be on MS NOW. There’s no bans or blacklist or whatever is out there in the internet world,” she said. “A lot of people want to be on MS NOW.”
Piker has said the United States deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks and regularly proclaims his hatred for the country. He has frequently complained about not being invited onto MS NOW even as he campaigns with Democrats across the country.
Darcy’s Status newsletter has been a font of gossip about Weiss and her stewardship of CBS News. During multiple interviews on Wednesday, he repeatedly attempted to goad panelists into attacking Weiss or her hires at the network—without success.
“I really think Tony [Dokoupil] does a great job,” said former NBC producer Jonathan Wald—who has reunited with Williams for a series of celebrity interviews on Netflix—about Weiss’s choice for CBS Evening News anchor. In response to Darcy fishing for an attack on the show’s ratings, Wald said, “I don’t think there’s much to worry about with those shows. They are what they are.”
“They do fairly well compared to podcasts,” he offered of nightly newscasts more broadly.
While Darcy’s former boss at CNN, Brian Stelter, crowed online that the Status summit was a “packed house,” there was a surfeit of empty seats all day at the Times Center, with many attendees telling the Washington Free Beacon their tickets had been comped. Darcy reached out to numerous media players in the days leading up to the summit, asking them to come for free.
In at least three different panels, Darcy and guests griped about Trump’s decision to rename bodies of water, specifically citing the “Gulf of America” and “Lake America.”
Darcy was aggressively trying to make money off his summit, charging $750 for all-access tickets—not including taxes and fees. He was also shopping various sponsorships for companies to buy. It’s not clear who actually paid for anything, considering that two big sponsors, William Morris Endeavor and Beehiiv, have business relationships with Status in which the money usually flows the other way. Beehiiv “adviser” Wendy McMahon, Weiss’s predecessor at CBS News, was a featured interviewee.
“May I ask, what do you make of your successors?” Darcy asked McMahon.
“I don’t know Bari, and so I’m always hesitant to assign, you know, ill intent or judgment really without truly understanding the motivations or the mission,” McMahon said.
McMahon claimed she chose to resign because “I knew enough about the editorial reset to come.” Status‘s competitor, Puck, reported at the time that McMahon “wasn’t very good at her job” and that her exit was “a firing dressed as a resignation so both sides could save face.”
Darcy—after relenting on his effort to get McMahon to more overtly trash Weiss—did not challenge her on her assertions.
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