BS BULLETIN:
- CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss personally directed that a headline about Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed specifically mention his deleted posts referencing the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Status reporter Oliver Darcy.
- The underlying CBS story revealed previously unreported deleted posts in which El-Sayed compared the mounting COVID death toll to 9/11 and argued America should wage a similarly determined “war for public health & against poverty.”
- The story triggered a newsroom brawl, with anonymous current and former CBS staffers accusing the network of unfairly targeting El-Sayed, while a source familiar with the editing process defended the reporting as standard scrutiny of a politician’s deleted posts.
If CBS News staffers were hoping Bari Weiss might distance herself from the network’s controversial Abdul El-Sayed story, they apparently picked the wrong boss.
She didn’t merely approve it.
According to Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, Weiss personally pushed for the headline to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted posts referencing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Darcy also reported that Weiss praised reporter Zak Hudak’s work during CBS News’ morning editorial meeting, effectively putting the editor-in-chief’s stamp on the piece.
That makes the newsroom explosion afterward considerably more interesting.
The CBS report examined several old social-media posts from El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee challenging Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open Senate seat.
Two previously unreported posts were written during the COVID pandemic.
In April 2020, El-Sayed compared the rapidly growing COVID death toll with the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11 and argued that the country should respond with the same national urgency.
In another post, he hoped America would spend the next decade fighting poverty and public-health problems with the determination it had brought to the War on Terror, saying the country could “save lives rather than take them.”
CBS also revisited a 2021 post in which El-Sayed mourned the victims of 9/11 before contrasting them with deaths and destruction resulting from the wars that followed the attacks.
Then there’s Hasan Piker.
El-Sayed has campaigned with the progressive streamer, who notoriously declared in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11” before later retracting the remark.
El-Sayed has explicitly rejected that position.
“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said during an April Fox & Friends interview cited by CBS.
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from making the association an issue in Michigan.
Rogers previously went considerably further, falsely claiming that El-Sayed himself believes America deserved 9/11. FactCheck.org found no evidence supporting that accusation.
But the latest fireworks aren’t really between Rogers and El-Sayed.
They’re inside CBS.
Darcy reported that some staffers viewed the story with disdain and complained to the network’s standards department. One CBS employee told Status that the network had taken a relatively small piece of news and inflated it into something much larger. A former senior staffer went much further, calling the story “shameful” and alleging that “the racism is overt.”
Mehdi Hasan piled on Tuesday, accusing Weiss of Islamophobia and describing El-Sayed’s old posts as uncontroversial.
But there’s another side to the newsroom fight.
A source familiar with CBS’s editing process defended the decision to the Daily Beast, arguing that stories about politicians deleting old social-media posts are hardly unusual and saying the headline change actually improved the original version. The source also noted that CBS subsequently aired an interview allowing El-Sayed to respond at length.
And whatever one thinks of the headline, CBS did uncover two El-Sayed posts that it says had not previously been reported. His campaign has said he deleted all posts predating July 2023 to prevent old material from being taken out of context — not that he selectively scrubbed the 9/11 material.
So now we have a story about deleted tweets becoming a story about the headline on the story about the deleted tweets.
Welcome to journalism in 2026.
MY QUICK TAKE
I’m having a little trouble with the idea that mentioning 9/11 in the headline of a story about deleted posts discussing 9/11 is some breathtaking journalistic offense.
There are fair questions about context. El-Sayed did not say America deserved 9/11, and nobody should pretend he did. His campaign’s explanation that he purged all of his older posts also matters.
But he’s running for the United States Senate. CBS found old posts. CBS reported them. The editor-in-chief apparently thought readers ought to know what those posts were about before clicking.
If that’s enough to cause a newsroom revolt, Bari Weiss may have uncovered an even bigger story than the one she published.
DBS WIRE SOURCES
- Bari Weiss ‘Personally Directed’ Controversial Headline in Abdul El-Sayed Article to Mention 9/11: Report
- For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks
- Bari Weiss Draws Backlash From CBS Staff Over Abdul El-Sayed Story
- Bari Weiss personally ordered the 9/11 angle in explosive El-Sayed headline: report
- Rogers Makes False 9/11 Claim About El-Sayed
