CBS News boss Bari Weiss drew intense backlash from her own staff after intervening in a story to tie Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Current and former staffers blasted to Status the “shameful” story the now-Trump-friendly network wrote about El-Sayed, who is bidding to be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, as well as an accompanying social media post suggesting he may be “facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Monday’s article was about how the Michigan Democrat had deleted two posts on X that he wrote during the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that the virus had already killed more Americans than the 2001 terror attacks.
In one since-deleted post, El-Sayed, a former epidemiologist and public health official, noted that more Americans had died in the COVID-19 pandemic than in the 9/11 attacks, and hoped “that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty ... like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.”
In another deleted post mentioned by CBS News, which El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021, he said, “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
The Democratic Socialist deleted the posts after scrubbing his entire social media output from before July 2023, with his campaign telling Politico that he did not want the posts to be “taken out of context.”
However, Weiss, who had no experience in television news production before Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison parachuted her into the role of editor-in-chief at CBS News, believed the deleted posts were scandalous enough to report on.
Sources told Status that Weiss even personally directed that the story’s headline be changed to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted posts referencing the 9/11 attacks.
The decision left many in the CBS newsroom in disarray, with staffers seeing it as another example of poor news judgment damaging the network’s reputation and credibility under Weiss’ reign.
“They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News staffer told Status.
A former senior CBS News staffer added that the story was “shameful” and that the “racism is overt.”
A source familiar with CBS News’ editing process told the Daily Beast that Weiss’ intervention to mention El-Sayed’s deleted posts had actually improved the original headline.
“Stories are published all the time about politicians’ deleted tweets. This is no different, and El-Sayed had not explained at the time of publication why he deleted the tweets,” the source said.
“We later published an on-camera interview with El-Sayed who gave a comprehensive response to the piece. And, given these points, the idea that staff are frustrated or upset about the piece simply is not accurate.”
The report was published as El-Sayed faces media scrutiny for embracing progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who has been widely criticized for suggesting that the U.S. deserved 9/11 as payback for previous foreign policy mistakes—a remark for which Piker has since apologized.
However, Status’ Oliver Darcy suggested that CBS News and Weiss would never have considered framing the story around El-Sayed’s deleted posts if the Democrat had not been a Muslim.
“He didn’t praise the 9/11 attackers, minimize the horror of the terrorist attacks, or promote conspiracy theories as to what happened that day—unlike many high-profile figures in the MAGA movement,” Darcy wrote.
“Like many mainstream figures at the time, he simply compared the death toll from the pandemic to 9/11 and argued that the government should respond to the public health crisis by marshaling its resources toward solving the problem with similar haste.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Abdul El-Sayed’s office for comment.
