Mehdi Hasan: The big transfer of the season in TV news

Hidden behind the current spate of headlines about a television world in crisis, a quiet transfer has been underway that could in future prove to be the television industry's equivalent of Wayne Rooney's move from Everton to Manchester United.

Until June, Mehdi Hasan was a deputy executive producer on Sky's Sunrise, the rolling channel's breakfast show hosted by Eamonn Holmes and simulcast on Sky One. Even though he was a key figure on the flagship programme, charged with broadening its appeal to younger viewers and planning its day-to-day coverage of news, entertainment and sport, the 28-year-old Hasan seemed light years away from more high-brow programmes like Unreported World and Dispatches, a field where some Sky colleagues felt Hasan might more naturally inhabit.

Instead, he seemed to be destined to a long and promising career at BSkyB, where one senior insider referred to him as being "among the brightest stars in the Sky News firmament". Indeed, on these pages only ten months ago, the head of Sky News John Ryley flagged up Hasan as one of his newsroom's youngest and perhaps finest talents. "Sky needs [such] people with panache," he wrote, "journalists with original ideas, who have a vision for the way news and current affairs are reported in the 21st century."

Hasan also caught the attention of Dorothy Byrne, the head of news and current affairs at Channel 4. Last month, out of the blue, she invited Hasan to the channel's Horseferry Road headquarters for a chat, and the rest is history.

Hasan starts next week as the channel's youngest editor for news and current affairs, and his lack of experience in making long-form documentaries does not faze his new boss. Instead, Byrne lavishes praise on Hasan, describing him as "one of the cleverest young men in television. Mehdi is proof there is still a role for intellectual big thinkers in television".

Hasan must now apply his ideas to help pull Channel 4 out of its current doldrums. In the words of former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, the channel's recent past "has not been its finest hour".

The broadcaster has been engulfed by the Celebrity Big Brother race row and the Richard & Judy phone scandal but Byrne's own department has not escaped unscathed: in its recent report on Channel 4, industry regulator Ofcom accused the broadcaster of devoting less money to news and current affairs than it did five years ago.

Hasan defends his new employer. "Where else at prime-time do you see hard-hitting, thought-provoking, one-hour documentaries like Dispatches? Where else do you see the informed and serious analysis of Channel 4 News?" he asks. "You won't see it on the BBC's new sixty-second news bulletin at 8pm and not even on what is, basically, Panorama-lite." Nor on Sky, he might add, but doesn't, being loyal to his old company.

In the sometimes superficial world of television, Hasan has always focused on the importance of issues, ideas and content. After graduating from Christ Church College, Oxford in 2000, with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics, he began his journalistic career answering the phones on the ITN newsdesk. Unstretched and unfulfilled, it took only nine months for him to make the jump into the world of political programmes, working as a researcher and then producer on LWT's Jonathan Dimbleby programme, with a brief stint in between on BBC1's The Politics Show.

Dimbleby, who has mentored countless young researchers and producers over the decades, remembers Hasan as a forthright and assertive member of the team. "My first impression was of someone with a very sharp mind who was not frightened to let people know he was nobody's fool," Dimbleby says. "Mehdi was unusually confident and clear-minded for someone with such little experience."

It is that confidence that has helped Hasan in his meteoric rise, and neither his race nor his religion seem to have hindered him. As a practising Muslim, born to immigrant parents, Hasan is keen to raise what he considers to be the growing Islamophobia infecting much of the media's coverage of the Muslim community.

"There is no doubt that elements of the British media are Islamophobic," he says. "Those who deny this fact need only look at the recent front pages of the Daily Express or the inside columns of The Daily Mail or Spectator." Hasan is keen to stress that both the media and the Muslim community need to do some serious work on what he considers to be their "dysfunctional and symbiotic" relationship. "For far too long, it's been a dialogue of the deaf between the two groups, based on false and simplistic assumptions," he says. "The media tend to portray the Muslim community, both at home and abroad, as a monolithically extreme and backward block. In turn, the Muslims reject the media as a monolithically biased and uninformed block."

Hasan believes that television is less hostile towards Muslims than the print media, and is keen to lay the blame for Islamophobia at the door of ignorance rather than racism. "Over the years, at the BBC, ITV and Sky, I have worked with countless producers and reporters who had never met a Muslim before they met me," he says, "or if they had, it was invariably an unrepresentative and loony extremist who they were interviewing or profiling for a story."

Hasan calls for more moderate Muslims in Britain to abandon traditional career paths towards medicine or engineering and to instead join the media and help influence the industry's coverage of issues such as terrorism and integration. "I see people like myself – who happen to be both a professional journalist and a practising Muslim – as a bridge between the Islamic community and the media, and by extension between Muslims and wider society," says Hasan.

It is a bold and perhaps ambitious claim, but one backed by Dimbleby, who has always considered Hasan to be a model of British Muslim citizenship. "Mehdi is a devout Muslim but is at all times entirely within the framework of liberal democratic society," he says. "He typifies the best of British."

Hasan, however, is justly keen not to be pigeonholed as "the Muslim journalist", and he refuses to wear his faith on his sleeve. Former colleagues will testify to his strong range of views and – above all – his knowledge on a multiplicity of issues, from British party politics to European history and to international macroeconomics.

And this is the fundamental point to bear in mind when considering Hasan, says a former colleague. "He is not just one of the brightest young Muslim journalists of his generation. He is one of the brightest young journalists of his generation, full stop."

The head of Sky News John Ryley realised, soon after Hasan's arrival there, that the young producer's ideas and initiatives could help to shake up Sky's coverage of important stories. "Mehdi challenges the status quo," says Ryley. "It is this that marks him out from the crowd." As was Everton with Rooney, Ryley is no doubt sad to see one of his young stars leave.

Now the young producer will be under huge pressure to prove himself as the exceptional programme maker that his admirers believe he can be.