Anyone who has seen the interview knows Mehdi wiped the floor with Taibbi and pointed out humiliating mistakes in his reporting -- even Taibbi accepted that.

As for the plagiarism, the article in question is from over 20 years ago, hardly a slam dunk nor is it a representative of his journalistic career. The only reason Fang wrote that is because Mehdi accused him of Islamophobia, it's just petty and desperate nonsense.

I did watch it. Mehdi Hassan found two errors in the entire body of work: One acronym (Taibbi wrote CIS when it was supposed to be CISA), and one date that he got wrong.

Then he hammered Taibbi for an hour on those two errors, as if he were a career fraudster, instead of a lion of journalism.

Mehdi Hasan is a fraud, an establishment actor on a failing corporate propaganda news network no one takes seriously. A tool of his billionaire owners and of the Biden neocons.

Petty and desperate nonsense indeed.

So, Hasan was a plagiarist as he fluffed powers-that-be for partisan credibility – including an example Fang cites from Hasan's 2012 book).

The other Fang allegations – including that Hasan now condemns & slurs people for the same sorts of socially-conservative views Hasan once espoused (& maybe still holds in his heart?) also seem well-sourced.

Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity have also "wiped the floor" against remote guests, on their shouty home-field cable TV shows. It's a medium for idiocy: slick & shameless verbal bullies win there, and anyone who adopts their news/views from such interactions remains stuck in a partisanship-addled haze.