CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has personally pushed the network’s journalists to pursue theories about Democratic candidates, according to insiders.
Weiss has repeatedly encouraged CBS reporters to put significant resources toward finding a potential link between Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood, Semafor reported, and she also had staff pursue a rumor that Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was in a mental health facility when he disappeared from the campaign trail.
According to the report, Weiss has raised the El-Sayed theory on editorial calls and put the network’s investigative unit to work digging into the Michigan Democrat’s past, and that team is expected to publish a story in the coming days. But two people familiar with the reporting told Semafor that, as of Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t clear whether the story would reveal anything new.
The scrutiny stems largely from a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s younger half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, describing “an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s.”
El-Sayed could become the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He has disavowed the Islamist movement and denied any family ties to it, saying his parents divorced when he was 3 years old and he didn’t see his mother for years. His campaign and its allies call the attacks thinly veiled Islamophobia.
“Judge me by my actions and my work, but please do not assume that because I might pray differently than anybody who’s ever held this office, that somehow I am not deeply committed to this Constitution,” El-Sayed told Semafor.
Weiss was also directly involved in an earlier CBS story about El-Sayed’s old posts comparing the COVID-19 death toll to 9/11. The Hollywood Reporter reported last month that critics inside the network said that story falsely insinuated El-Sayed had ties to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Some CBS staffers have complained that Weiss zeroes in on theories about prominent progressive candidates that originate on X or in right-leaning outlets, according to Semafor. That included the Talarico rumor, which proved false. He was at home with the flu, the New York Times confirmed, and CBS never gave the theory public credence.
“Bari’s ideas routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets, and those stories usually leave out important context and facts,” one CBS staffer said.
The network faced fresh embarrassment Sunday when legal correspondent Jan Crawford deleted a post praising the Republican operative who pressed El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood at a town hall, and she apologized for violating network standards.
A CBS News spokesperson defended the network’s coverage as rigorous and said it has reported just as aggressively on other competitive Senate races.
“We’ll let our journalism — not baseless accusations — speak for itself,” the spokesperson said.
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