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Press Freedom Defense Fund

CBS News Spins El-Sayed’s 9/11 Tweets Into a Manufactured Anti-Muslim Scandal

Centrist Democrats opened the door for anti-Muslim attacks on their party’s nominee in Michigan — finding common cause with right-wing bigots.

Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.”

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.”

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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 decadelong war on terror and a call to action: “We could save lives rather than take them.”

El-Sayed’s campaign previously told Politico that all posts older than July 2023 were deleted “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.”

Weiss’s guidance led to CBS News’s racist framing that there’s just something different — even untrustworthy — about El-Sayed, and that the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 is the right time to ask what that is.

In doing so, she’s embracing a long-standing bipartisan tradition of Muslim dehumanization — a playbook still being deployed on both sides of the aisle. The current anti-Muslim environment reflects the growth and regression in the country since the 9/11 moment: growth in the number of Muslims in political and public life, and the regressive backlash to multicultural liberalism that’s defined the Trump era. 

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This kind of bigotry was rampant during the early 2000s, particularly in 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration weaponized Americans’ anger and shock over the attacks to gin up support for its war of choice on Iraq.

Weiss’s guidance led to CBS News’s racist framing that there’s just something different — even untrustworthy — about El-Sayed, and that the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 is the right time to ask what that........

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