CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss drew backlash from current and former staff after she intervened in a story about Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and the Sept. 11 attacks, according to reporting by Status. Staffers described the resulting piece as “shameful.”
The CBS News article, published Monday, focused on two deleted posts El-Sayed wrote on X during the COVID-19 pandemic. The network framed the posts as a possible source of renewed scrutiny as the country prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001.
In one deleted post from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the rising COVID-19 death toll. He wrote that he hoped that comparison would mean Americans would “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.”
Staffers and a CBS source described the same story in opposite ways
Sources told Status that Weiss personally directed that the headline be changed so it would specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted posts referring to the 9/11 attacks. One staffer told Status, “They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, and messed up.”
A former senior staffer called the story “shameful” and said the “racism is overt.” Status writer Oliver Darcy argued that the network and Weiss would not have framed the story around the deleted posts if El-Sayed were not Muslim. Darcy wrote that El-Sayed “didn’t praise the 9/11 attackers, minimize the horror of the terrorist attacks, or promote conspiracy theories as to what happened that day.”
A source familiar with CBS News’ editing process told The Daily Beast that Weiss’s change had 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.
The same source said CBS later published an on-camera interview in which El-Sayed gave a response to the piece, and added that “the idea that staff are frustrated or upset about the piece simply is not accurate.”
The Daily Beast reported that Weiss had no television news production experience before Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison named her editor-in-chief at CBS News. This is not the first time Weiss’s leadership at CBS News has faced scrutiny, as a former 60 Minutes correspondent has accused her and Paramount CEO David Ellison of pressuring her to report on events that never happened.
El-Sayed’s campaign told Politico that he deleted all posts older than July 2023 “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.” Campaign spokesperson Roxie Richner said the deletion did not target any single topic. A campaign spokesperson told CBS News, “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” and called Republican attempts to recast his views “bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”
In another deleted post, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon and later cited in the Monday article, El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021: “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.”
Asked by CBS Detroit whether the posts would make it harder to reach moderate voters, El-Sayed said, “I think all of us look back and say 9/11 was an awful thing that happened in this country, and I think all of us also look back and say, think about all the wars that were fought and how much safer do we feel like they made us?” He added that 9/11 was “a disaster” and “a terrible attack on our country.”
The Monday report also noted that El-Sayed has faced questions about progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who has appeared at his events. Piker was criticized for saying the United States “deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark. El-Sayed told Fox & Friends in April, “Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified. Just because you appear with somebody doesn’t mean you agree with them on everything.”
Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s general-election opponent, issued a statement after the Democratic nomination that the article said falsely attributed Piker’s comments to El-Sayed. Rogers said, “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.” In his 2020 book “Healing Politics,” El-Sayed called the Sept. 11 events “craven terrorist attacks” and said they “devastated him.”
El-Sayed told Politico that voters’ costs matter more than old posts. “You can talk about my tweets if you want to, but you can’t afford your health care, you can’t afford your groceries, you can’t afford your housing,” he said. He also said, “I’ve been to 400-plus public events, and nobody’s ever asked me about my tweets,” and that expecting anyone to “stand by everything you ever said, out of context, is an insane thing to assume about anybody.”
Lansing consultant Adrian Hemond said El-Sayed has what he called a “Quacks like a duck problem,” meaning enough past comments have raised questions that he has not fully answered.
Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann said any single tweet is unlikely to decide the race, but a broader impression that El-Sayed is too extreme “has a bigger chance of doing so.” El-Sayed has faced scrutiny for past comments, such as when he called JD Vance ‘Peter Thiel’s boy’ and Vance responded by calling him ‘crazy and potentially a terrible senator.’
Published: Sep 2, 2026 12:15 pm