Long Form Podcast Episode 4
Why the U.S. Media & Democrats Won’t Save Anyone
Featuring:
Laila Al-Arian
Assal Rad
Sana Saeed
Hosts:
Bassam Haddad
Adel Iskandar
Thursday, 3 April, 2025 | 2:00PM EST
In this episode of Long Form Podcast, Laila Al-Arian, Assal Rad, and Sana Saeed address the role of corporate media and the Democratic party in enabling Israel’s Genocide and paving the way for many of Trump’s policies. Speakers also address the Democrats’ double standard on ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
Long Form consists of a series of lengthy discussions and conversations with leading thinkers, scholars, and activists that explores the most pressing issues of our day, sheds light on their context and dynamics, and in so doing seeks to explore the broader theme of challenges to the global order and how these might affect it.
Featuring
Laila Al-Arian is a Washington DC-based journalist and the executive producer of Fault Lines, an award-winning current affairs program on Al Jazeera English. She has produced documentaries on subjects ranging from the Trump administration's Muslim ban to the impact of the heroin epidemic on children and an investigation into factory conditions producing garments for Walmart and Gap in Bangladesh. For her work, she has been honored with two News and Documentary Emmys, a George Polk Award, Peabody Award, a Robert F Kennedy Award in journalism, Overseas Press Club award and has been nominated for 19 News and Documentary Emmys.
Sana Saeed is a media critic, former correspondent at AJ+ and host of the series Backspace, and The Israeli Occupation Style Guide.
Assal Rad is a scholar of Middle East history. She works on research and writing related to U.S. foreign policy issues, the Middle East, and contemporary Iran. Her writing can be seen in Newsweek, The National Interest, The Independent, Foreign Policy and more, and she has appeared as a commentator on BBC World, Al Jazeera, CNN, and NPR. She completed a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine in 2018 and is the author of The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Follow Assal on X/Twitter: @AssalRad
Bassam Haddad (Host) is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
Adel Iskandar (Host) is an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he is the Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and the Chair of Graduate Studies in the School of Communication. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous works including Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press, 2010). Iskandar is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.