MAKING MISTAKES

MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Forced Into Humiliating Admission

The Free Press expressed “regret” about the gaffe.

Bari Weiss, the MAGA-curious boss of CBS News, has been forced to make a humiliating admission after an error surfaced in her other job.

Weiss, 42, founded the news and opinion website The Free Press in 2021 to tackle what she saw as “woke” media. Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison bought the website for $150 million in October last year, also installing Weiss at CBS. She has since overhauled 60 Minutes, leading to an exodus in staff.

She now continues to do double duty at CBS and The Free Press, with the opinion news site caught up in an embarrassing error last week over its coverage of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed became the nation’s first Muslim senator-elect after last week’s midterm elections, despite being the subject of insults and vitriol from Republicans from President Donald Trump down.

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Weiss’ site, which claims it is “Honest,” “Independent,” and “Fearless,” inaccurately claimed in a since-deleted Nov. 4 post on X that El-Sayed “gave his victory speech in Arabic last night.”

Reporter and host Maya Sulkin repeated the same claim in a corresponding video. “So that is the first Muslim senator in American history giving his victory speech in Detroit—in Arabic,” she said.

During his victory speech last week, El-Sayed pronounced his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, and used three other Arabic expressions: “inshallah” (twice), “Alhamdulillah,” and “habibi.”

Sulkin added in her video, “In their first speeches to the American public on the night they win power, they address Americans in foreign languages. And no one in the Democratic Party seems to think that this is strange.”

Two days after making the problematic post, The Free Press posted on X on Friday, “CORRECTION: This post and opinion video states that Abdul El-Sayed gave his acceptance speech in Arabic. That’s not accurate. In fact, he said a few phrases in Arabic, but the majority of his speech was in English. The Free Press regrets the error.”

On Sunday, five days after the video was first posted, The Free Press announced that it had removed it, going further than Friday’s correction by acknowledging that the video’s tone had fallen short of its standards.

“We deleted an opinion video about the use of foreign languages in election night speeches,” the post said, without naming El-Sayed.

“The post contained a factual error and its tone fell short of what we believe advances healthy public discourse.”

It continued, “The rigorous editorial process that produces the work that appears on our website and in our newsletters must apply to everything we post on social media. We’ll be updating how we do things to achieve just that. We regret the error.”

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The website made another error last Thursday, after Deputy Editor Oliver Wiseman called Iowa Senator-elect Josh Turek a “Special Olympics athlete.” The incoming Democratic lawmaker, who has spina bifida, is a Paralympian who played wheelchair basketball. The mistake was later fixed.

The Daily Beast has contacted The Free Press for comment.

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