CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss wanted an even more “sensationalized” headline on the story tying Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to Sept. 11, staffers told Zeteo on Thursday.
Three CBS sources described that push to Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona, who reported Thursday that the sources would not say what additional changes Weiss was seeking.
The network published the story Monday, and Zeteo reported that anger inside the newsroom has not let up over either the article or the post the network used to promote it.
“Yeah, it’s trash. The article itself is also horribly Islamophobic,” a CBS News staffer told Zeteo.
“What the heck does 9/11 have to do with Abdul [El-Sayed]?” another network insider asked, according to Zeteo.
The article went up on Aug. 31, Media Matters reported, under a headline reading, “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”
“As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack,” the story began, according to The New Republic.
That same sentence went out from the network’s official account on X, The New Republic reported.
Weiss praised the story at the network’s daily editorial meeting that Monday and signaled her support for it to the entire network, Status’s Oliver Darcy first reported.
She also personally directed that the headline be changed to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to Status.
The headline had originally read, “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks,” a person familiar with the story told The New Republic. That person said Weiss “strengthened” it and was not “intimately involved in the reporting process.”
Three CBS sources went further, telling Zeteo that Weiss suggested the headline be made even more “sensationalized,” though they would not describe the additional changes she wanted.
A source familiar with the situation disputed that account, telling Zeteo that Weiss wanted the headline to be “more accurate.”
Senior staffers carried their objections to the network’s standards department, Status reported, but little came of it because Weiss was so deeply involved in the article herself.
“They took a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News employee told Status.
“The racism is overt,” a former senior CBS News staffer told Status, who also called the article “shameful.”
A person familiar with the story rejected that, telling The New Republic there was nothing “racist or Islamophobic” about reporting on El-Sayed’s deleted tweets.
El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary on Aug. 4 by about a point and will face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in November, Al Jazeera reported. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, according to The Daily Beast.
Rogers has already reached for the same attack, saying after the primary that El-Sayed “believes America deserved 9/11,” according to The Conversation.
The posts at the center of the CBS story date to the Covid-19 pandemic, when El-Sayed was a public health official. He compared the rising death toll to the nearly 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11 and argued for a government response on the same scale, Media Matters reported.
He also wrote that the government should “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty” rather than fight wars in the Middle East, according to The New Republic.
In a third post, El-Sayed mourned both the people killed on 9/11 and those killed in the U.S. war on terror, Media Matters reported. By CBS News’s own account, none of the posts showed contempt for the victims of the attacks or defended them.
Comparisons like his were routine in 2020 and 2021, Media Matters reported, including among the Fox News hosts now attacking him over them.
“In that case, this virus is much like 9/11. … So we have to think about this the same way we think about terrorism and thinking about 9/11,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said at the time, according to Media Matters.
“Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11,” former Fox News host Neil Cavuto said, Media Matters reported.
“This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There’s never been an attack like this,” President Donald Trump said in May 2020, according to Media Matters. His surgeon general had called the pandemic “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment” a month earlier.
El-Sayed’s campaign had already said publicly that he deleted every post he wrote before 2023, The New Republic reported. He told Politico he had removed all of his posts on X older than July 2023, according to Zeteo.
Fox News host Sean Hannity displayed the CBS News headline on his Aug. 31 broadcast, Media Matters reported.
“El-Sayed seems to be creating a moral equivalency here, thinking that America — what — does far more harm than al-Qaeda?” Hannity said, according to Media Matters.
Hannity went on to say El-Sayed “doesn’t love America” and “has regularly attacked this country,” Media Matters reported.
Fox News host Jesse Watters told viewers El-Sayed was “scrambling to delete tweets from 9/11,” was “hiding a lot” and wanted to “knock America down to size,” according to Media Matters.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham said El-Sayed “was never really vetted” and faulted Democrats for not making “a big deal about his 9/11 tweets where he showed such utter disdain for American suffering,” Media Matters reported.
CBS News has changed the story several times since publication, Zeteo reported. Compared with an archived version, the updated piece added El-Sayed’s explanation to Politico about the deletions and answers he gave a CBS News Detroit reporter after the article ran.
Baragona’s sources said not to expect an editor’s note, and staffers told Zeteo they have heard nothing from management beyond Weiss’s enthusiasm at Monday’s meeting.
Weiss founded the pro-Israel site The Free Press and wrote opinion columns for The New York Times before Paramount installed her atop CBS News late last year, The New Republic reported. She had never worked in broadcast news and had never run a major news operation.
Under her leadership the network has killed critical stories to spare the Trump administration embarrassment and has lost “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, anchor Anderson Cooper and correspondent Scott Pelley, according to The New Republic.
Pelley, who was fired from the program earlier this year, later accused Weiss’s management team of instructing him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Common Dreams reported.
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