CBS News’ Bari Weiss Faces Backlash Over Headline Linking Muslim Senate Candidate to 9/11

Following devastating staff cuts and a chorus of pushback, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is courting controversy once again for her editorial decisions at the helm of the network’s news division — this time for overseeing an article that critics say falsely insinuated Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed had ties to the September 11 attacks.

In CBS News’ Monday morning editorial meeting, Weiss reportedly praised the story written by Washington, D.C.-based producer Zak Hudak and directed that its headline be reworked. According to a source inside the network who is familiar with the article’s progression through the edit process, the original headline was, “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks.” Weiss, the source told The Hollywood Reporter, reworked it to include mention of the two tweets the article brings forward to discuss.

Published with the headline “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks,” the article surfaces two tweets from years ago that the candidate opted to delete, along with all of his other posts before July 2023; his campaign has said this move was to prevent “any old posts from being taken out of context.”

Reaction to the CBS News story was swift, with one senior staffer calling the piece “a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” while Atlantic writer Helen Lewis criticized it as a political dog whistle using a thin premise to set El-Sayed’s name next to the phrase “9/11 attacks,” making an implication by association. Critics are now railing against Weiss for her role overseeing the newsroom that produced the piece and shaping part of the article, which many see as not merely taking the words out of context but wholly mischaracterizing them. Both of the COVID-era posts from El-Sayed, a public health advocate, compared the death toll and devastation of the September 11 attacks to the mounting toll of the pandemic.

In the tweets in question, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll while advocating for a response as robust as the post-9/11 mobilization. In the second tweet, El-Sayed wrote that because more U.S. citizens had died from COVID than in the September 11 attacks, he 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.”

The article frames the unearthed tweets against the backdrop of the approaching 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, casting El-Sayed as facing renewed political scrutiny as his campaign heats up and he’s forced to address the posts amid a historically unifying moment in American politics.

A spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign said in a statement to CBS News that “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” adding that his opponent, Mike Rogers, is engaged in “bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”

The Hollywood Reporter reached out to El-Sayed’s campaign for comment on the controversy but did not hear back Tuesday.

Weiss, a longtime lightning rod for controversy, was elevated to CBS News editor-in-chief last year by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, as he bought The Free Press, the website she founded after leaving the New York Times amid a firestorm of controversy — her first to gain national attention, but not her last. Since her ascent, she has faced scrutiny over her lack of broadcast news experience and criticism for killing segments seen as critical of Trump administration policy.

The incident is not the first time the network has been criticized over its characterization of a politician of Muslim faith. In July, the network5 was forced to remove a line from its coverage of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani after a false claim about those who signed a petition to keep the progressive Democratic mayor out of an upcoming 9/11 attacks 25th remembrance ceremony.