It's November!

Hi Gang!

I’ve been busy juggling a few stories on different mediums lately but nothing worth showing all of your lovely faces yet. I just wanted to check in and see how everyone is doing here.

For this week I have some quick thoughts and highlights below that I want to share with everyone.

Quick Highlights

Obama put out a nice blog post about his thoughts on Gaza right now which I thought was very neutral and well-informed.

Nicole Koke an online content creator has been putting out some good tips on how to navigate media right now social and traditional through her newsletter which I also think has some insightful tips. Check out her podcast.

Mariah Carey has leaned into her most famous time of year.

Hasan Minhaj put out a response to a New Yorker article attacking him and it’s such a well-done way to go against being “canceled”

Actually, in real time, I think I will do a quick deep dive into the Hasan Minhaj drama for the uninformed.

Hasan Minhaj claps back at the haters with receipts

To preface this article I usually let my biases in my stories come out through the writing but I will just highlight here that my bias is fully with Hasan in this case which may affect my judgement when describing the events that unfolded.

If you don’t know back in September the New Yorker published an article about Hasan Minhaj that stated they fact-checked some of Hasan’s latest stand-ups and uncovered that some of his stories in his standups were not true. The article then goes on to deep dive into their fact-checking of those stories that weren’t true, which Hasan himself admits isn’t true in the article.

The severity of some of these stories not being true all in all paints Minhaj to be “psycho” Minhaj even admits himself in his rebuttal video. The New Yorker article really does lean into this and does a wonderful job of tearing down any credibility Minhaj has gotten over his years in the business. To keep this article short I won’t dive too much into each of the stories for now.

The backlash after the article was like a quake through the comedy and political world. Hasan who had allegedly been the top runner to be the new host of The Daily Show was supposedly booted off the race after the article, on top of every other news site or podcast taking the opportunity to just rag on him as well.

Now about two weeks ago Hasan made his rebuttal video where he goes back and fact-checks the New Yorker article. He flat-out disproves one of the claims that one of his stories was untrue with email and voice recording receipts. Hasan then goes on to explain how and why some of the stories he tells in the special have falsified info in them. In general, the reasoning is to give a better story or thematic tone to the events that happened in his real life which he explains aren’t in the same vein as blatantly making entire stories up out of thin air but changing certain events or characters to make for a better story with a harder punchline. Hasan also notes how some of his quotes were spliced around to prove more of the New Yorkers’ point instead of the actual point he was trying to prove.

It’s interesting to note how the two sides of this story sort of say the same thing but paint two very different pictures of Hasan. One thing to also note is that comedians are known to make up stories or change the details of stories in order to make the comedy stronger. Hasan here doesn’t necessarily make the comedy stronger with the facts he changes but the punchline in a lot of these cases and isn’t the punchline the most important part of the joke even if it’s not funny? The New Yorker does kind of state that jokes don’t need to be true but doesn’t really highlight this as the purpose of the article is to find the truth.

All in all, it seems that Hasan has won back a good chunk of the people but may have still lost out on a prime gig hosting The Daily Show which leaves me to ask some questions about the initial article to start with. Why was the article written almost a year after the special in the midst of the hunt to find a new Daily Show Host? Why is Hasan really the only Comedian, a brown Muslim one at that, to get fact-checked so hard? Why does it seem like this is the first New Yorker article to really get any big promotion or traction within the last year?

Even in the name of truth media seems to have some sort of bias.