Bari Weiss Draws Backlash From CBS Staff Over Abdul El-Sayed Story

Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press CBS News boss Bari Weiss drew intense backlash from her own staff after intervening in a story to tie Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the anniversary of the Sept.

11 terror attacks.

Current and former staffers blasted to Status the “shameful” story the now- Trump-friendly network wrote about El-Sayed, who is bidding to be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, as well as an accompanying social media post suggesting he may be “facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Monday’s article was about how the Michigan Democrat had deleted two posts on X that he wrote at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, noting that the virus had already killed more Americans than the 2001 terror attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

In one since-deleted post, El-Sayed, a former epidemiologist and public health official, wrote that he hoped “we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty ... like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11.” There was nothing particularly incendiary about El-Sayed’s posts comparing the response and death toll of COVID-19 to the 9/11 attacks.

The Democratic Socialist deleted them after scrubbing his entire social media output from before July 2023, with his campaign telling Politico that he did not want the posts to be “taken out of context.” However, Weiss, who had no experience in television news production before Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison parachuted her into the role of editor-in-chief at CBS News, believed the deleted posts were scandalous enough to report on.

Sources told Status that Weiss even personally directed that the story’s headline be changed to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted posts referencing 9/11.

The decision left many in the CBS newsroom in disarray, with staffers seeing it as another example of poor news judgment damaging the network’s reputation and credibility under Weiss’ reign.

“They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News staffer told Status.

A former senior CBS News staffer added that the story was “shameful” and that the “racism is overt.” The report was published as El-Sayed faces media scrutiny for embracing progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who has been widely criticized for suggesting that the U.S. deserved 9/11 as payback for previous foreign policy mistakes—a remark for which Piker has since apologized.

However, Status’ Oliver Darcy suggested that CBS News and Weiss would never have considered framing the story around El-Sayed’s deleted posts if the Democrat had not been a Muslim .