A decade ago, I watched the alt-left media take shape. It was the mirror image of the Trump-supporting alt-right: the same contempt for the press, the same conviction that the real story was always being hidden, and the same instinct to treat distrust as a badge of honour. The targets were different but the reflex was the same. It pushed Jeremy Corbyn's project, downplayed antisemitism, and dismissed the people who raised it. After October 7, some of those same voices excused the Hamas massacre. Others celebrated it.
Now there is Zeteo UK – a "progressive" news platform with serious money behind it. It launched with a slick video from its editor, the former primetime broadcaster Mehdi Hasan, who has since been doing the rounds on the very mainstream media, or "MSM", he claims to oppose.
That word, MSM, makes me cringe. But it tells you something about the organisation and its target audience. It is a lazy cliché dressed as analysis. The language of the conspiracy-minded who distrust the press on principle. Hasan named the strategy himself: a "gap in the market" among the "super dissatisfied." That is not a description of a readership but of a mood. Disillusionment isn't a side effect of Zeteo UK – it is the product. A business built on grievance has every reason to keep its audience aggrieved. MSM is simply the password that tells them they're in the right room.
I'm no fan of Jeremy Hunt. But watching him face Hasan on Newsnight, the gulf was obvious – considered argument against populist anti-elite slogans. In the open air, against scrutiny, Hasan's case looked thin. Then again, Zeteo UK isn't built for the open air but for the room where everyone already agrees.
So what do the new hires tell us to expect?
Peter Oborne has claimed that antisemitism allegations are "weaponised" on behalf of Israel. He presented a Channel 4 documentary, "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby," promoted online by figures from the National Front and the BNP. The historian David Cesarani called it a "shallow polemic." The CST noted that its language echoed traditional antisemitic tropes. Is this what Zeteo UK means when it promises to "speak truth to power"?
There is a pattern. The former Guardian comments editor Becky Gardiner spent Holocaust Memorial Day defending the blood-libeller Raed Salah. At university, Owen Jones edited Wikipedia to describe Jewish ethnicity as "a lie invented by 19th century German anti-Semites". Two decades on, he was promoting the fantasy that "Israel is using dogs to rape Palestinians".
Grace Blakeley backed the boycott of Baillie Gifford over the most tenuous links with Israel. It plunged Britain's literary festivals into a financial crisis almost overnight. I don't hold much hope for a platform "committed to the truth" that points in only one direction.
You could call any one of these a misstep. Together they are a worldview. The thread is not hard to find: a fraught relationship with the mainstream Jewish community, and a shared conviction that antisemitism is less a problem to be confronted than a plot to be exposed. That is not a flaw in the hiring. On a platform like this, it reads like the qualification.
These standards were on show before a single hire was confirmed.
Zeteo UK sells itself as adversarial journalism – the outlet that speaks truth to power. Zack Polanski, leader of the Greens, is that power. His party has councillors and MPs; he sits on the London Assembly himself. So watch how the platform treats him. Zeteo brands its own founder an "all-round troublemaker." When the Telegraph reported Polanski rejoicing at the platform's arrival, the Green leader leaned in – telling his followers the "troublemaker" was in fact a "brilliant and highly respected journalist," and steering them to follow Zeteo UK. The warmth predates the UK launch. The original Zeteo hosted Polanski for an exclusive Q&A with its subscribers. Zeteo boosted him; he boosted Zeteo UK. That is not the press holding power to account.
So this is the brave new journalism: one opinion, every bias pointing the same way, dissent dispatched to the social media gulag. Siloed outlets, each circling a single viewpoint that no one inside is willing to challenge. If that is the future, count me out. Learning to sit with disagreement cannot become a thing of the past – or we all end up deeper inside our own echo chambers, certain and unchallenged and worse for it.
It doesn't matter how much funding they have. A boutique grievance newsletter is not a glittering new chapter in serious journalism. If Zeteo UK is what comes next, then the future isn't what it used to be.
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