Insiders at CBS have reportedly accused Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers’ campaign of cutting context from a viral 60 Minutes clip of his Democratic opponent.
“CBS sources have reiterated to me it was the Mike Rogers campaign that clipped this exchange to strip away the context, not the network,” Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona wrote on X Monday. Rogers’ campaign has not publicly responded to the claim.
Rogers posted the clip Sunday night, the night 60 Minutes aired interviews with him and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Tuesday’s election.
Rogers’ post quoted El-Sayed saying something the clip does not show him saying.
“[Abdul El-Sayed] says it’s ok for MEN to be in girl’s locker rooms,” Rogers wrote, then put this line in quotation marks as El-Sayed’s explanation. “Well because they are going to find out about it on the internet anyway.”
El-Sayed never says that sentence in the 70-second video Rogers shared. The nearest line in the video is his remark about having to “make do with the fact that, like, the Internet is a real thing.”
“This is all over my timeline, and it’s totally out of context,” Vanity Fair Washington correspondent Aidan McLaughlin wrote on X Monday.
“No one mentions locker rooms,” he pointed out.
“I’m not running to govern sports,” El-Sayed said later in the same answer, according to the extended interview 60 Minutes posted online.
“To me, I think it’s really important for us to fight at the state level to protect access to bathrooms, to locker rooms, to sports teams of choice for young people,” El-Sayed told Pride Source during his 2018 run for governor.
By Monday, Rogers’ post had drawn 9.6 million views on X, while McLaughlin’s post flagging the missing context had about 83,000, according to the platform’s counts. The clipped version drew more than 100 times as many views as the post disputing it, a day before Michigan votes.
The clip came from extended interviews 60 Minutes posted Sunday alongside a fact-check that said both candidates made claims “that were false, misleading or unsupported by our reporting.” Among them was Rogers’ charge that El-Sayed “wrote a letter in support for the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The network reported that El-Sayed signed a letter to Egypt’s then-president, a Brotherhood leader, and that El-Sayed denies any ties to the group. Rogers drew his clip from the same release in which the network had taken issue with his own claims about El-Sayed.
During the 2024 race, CBS News called it “false” when President Donald Trump, then a candidate, accused 60 Minutes of deceitfully editing its interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Fox News reported.
This time, CBS sources say, the editing came from Rogers’ campaign, which CBS noted has Trump’s backing.
Rogers’ clip left out the part of the question about Islam, in a race where Trump had cast El-Sayed as a “jihadist” and Rogers had questioned his loyalty.
Before he reached sports, 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat asked El-Sayed about “tension between Islam and Muslim voters and what I’m calling cultural liberalism,” including “what is taught in school,” according to the extended interview. Rogers’ clip starts after that.
On Oct. 25, a week before the interview aired, Trump told a Port Huron rally he had come “to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” the Associated Press reported, describing his remarks as anti-Muslim rhetoric.
“Are you for America, or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Rogers asked El-Sayed at their final debate, the AP reported.
According to the AP, there is no evidence that El-Sayed has any affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed, who would be the nation’s first Muslim senator, said the question was shameful, the news service reported.
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