Mehdi Hasan Interview: Al Jazeera Apologised to Me in Private — Bwala

Presidential aide Daniel Bwala has said that Al Jazeera privately apologised to him over his widely criticised interview with Mehdi Hasan on the network’s Head to Head programme.

Bwala said the broadcaster refused his request to make the apology public, a development he said prompted him to direct his lawyers in England to file a defamation suit.

He made the disclosure during an interview on
Morayo Afolabi-Brown’s show, which was published on YouTube on Wednesday, several months after his appearance on Al Jazeera in March 2026.

During the interview, Hasan confronted Bwala with some of his previous comments against President Bola Tinubu, made at a time when Bwala was supporting former Vice-President
Atiku Abubakar.

Asked whether he had demanded an apology from Hasan following the interview, Bwala said the network acknowledged its conduct but refused to make it public.

“They apologised to me privately. I said they should put it on social media. They said they will not put it on social media, it will affect their credibility, because it’s not just them, but their other programmers at the Al Jazeera network too,” he said.

Asked what the substance of the apology was, Bwala said it centred on Al Jazeera’s failure to disclose that part of the interview would interrogate his credibility over his past criticism of Tinubu.

“The substance of the apology was that they should have told me that part of what they discussed with me was a talking point, that they were also going to interrogate me on my credibility for supporting the person I had attacked before.

“By their own ethics, they ought to have told me that, but they said they were sorry they didn’t,” he said.

He said he also consulted media analysts, including British broadcaster Piers Morgan, whom he said he reached through a third party, and who agreed that the network’s handling of the interview was wrong.

“If you’re bold, if you call yourself a journalist, a fact-checker, you run your programme live and let people judge live.

“If you’re thinking straight, that’s what you’d do. You took creative control of the programme. You made a recorded programme. Ethics demanded you publish it exactly as it was recorded,” he said.

Bwala said the programme ran for one hour and 30 minutes but Al Jazeera published only 49 minutes, and accused the network of skewing the footage in Hasan’s favour.

“The deeper point is that they cut out the parts where I was fact-checking him and the crowd was clapping for me, and instead kept the parts where he was speaking and people were clapping for him,” he said.

He alleged that Hasan brought up old clips of his past comments without disclosing the context to viewers.

“He’d ask me a question, I’d deny it, then he’d play the old clip. We call that ‘cut and joined’ in media. After doing that, which amounts to a smear campaign, he didn’t give me the chance to react to it.

“Instead, he let it appear that I was simply asked a question, denied it, was shown the clip, denied it again, was shown another clip, and denied it again,” he said.

Bwala said Al Jazeera also cut out his opening remark, in which he said he would deny questions about his past comments if the interview strayed from its agreed focus.

“He removed that part, because if he’d left it in, anyone watching would understand that I had already answered the question upfront, and that my later denials were a response to his repeated bringing it up. That’s where the unethical conduct of a professional issue arose,” he said.

Bwala said he escalated the matter to court after Al Jazeera rejected his demand for a public apology.

“When they apologised, I said no, put it on social media. They refused. So I instructed my lawyers in England to go to court. The case is currently in court,” he said.

Asked why he opted to pursue the matter in court rather than accept the private apology, Bwala said his lawyers in England advised that the network’s conduct amounted to defamation.

“Because my advisers in England said it’s defamation of character,” he said.