Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks with reporters at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Aug. 26, 2026.
Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images
It always felt
inevitable that Bari Weiss’s tenure at CBS News would see the network devolve into rank Islamophobia — but even for most of us, who took a dim view of her takeover of the news behemoth, tying Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 attacks was an unexpected new low. To make matters worse, many centrist Democrats and their allies cleared the way for just this kind of attack.
On Monday, CBS reporter Zak Hudak
published an article
headlined with the critique that El-Sayed’s “deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.” Weiss, whose time in charge of CBS has been
rife
with
controversy
, was reportedly deeply involved with the story’s promotion and framing, going so far as to praise it in a newsroom meeting and champion it “to the entire network,” according to media-industry newsletter
Status
. She “even personally directed the headline to be tweaked to specifically mention” the 9/11 angle.
The story immediately came under harsh criticism, even from people whose politics when it comes to Muslims are virtually indistinguishable from Weiss’s. Atlantic writer Jonathan Chait, for example,
called the tweets
a “non-story.”
3,000 Dead on 9/11 Meant Everything. 200,000 Dead of Covid-19 Means Nothing. Here’s Why.
CBS declined to mention that two of those three deleted posts were asking Americans to take the death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic as seriously as the attacks. It’s worth noting — CBS did not — that invoking 9/11 to put the Covid death toll in perspective
wasn’t unusual
at the time; then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo
directly compared
the pandemic, which ravaged New York City, to the attacks the same month that El-Sayed did.
Another post at issue was a rather anodyne comment about the consequences of the d
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