CBS News’ Bari Weiss Faces Backlash Over Headline Linking Muslim Senate Candidate to 9/11

Following devastating staff cuts and a chorus of pushback, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is courting controversy once again for her editorial decisions at the helm of the network’s news division — this time for overseeing an article that critics say falsely insinuated Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed had ties to the September 11 attacks.

In CBS News’ Monday morning editorial meeting, Weiss reportedly praised the story written by Washington, D.C.-based producer Zak Hudak and directed that its headline be reworked — which has led the intervention to be criticized as a political dog whistle in this respect, using a thin premise to set El-Sayed’s name next to the phrase “ 9/11 attacks,” making an implication by association. Related Stories TV Bon Jovi and Fallon Among Stars in Michael Strahan-Led Doc '9/11: United We Stand': Where to Watch Online TV New Docuseries '9/11 Reunited' Connects Survivors 25 Years Later: How to Watch the Three-Part Special

The article, headlined “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks,” surfaces two tweets that the candidate opted to delete, along with all of his other posts before July 2023, to prevent “any old posts from being taken out of context.”

Reaction was swift, with one senior staffer calling the piece “a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up.” Critics are now railing against Weiss for her role in shaping the article, which many see as not merely taken out of context but wholly mischaracterized. Both of the COVID-era posts from El-Sayed, a public health advocate, compared the death toll and devastation of the September 11 attacks to the mounting toll of the pandemic.

In the tweets in question, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll while advocating for a response as robust as the post-9/11 mobilization. In the second tweet, El-Sayed wrote that because more U.S. citizens had died from COVID than in the September 11 attacks, he hoped “that means we’ll 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.”

The article frames the unearthed tweets against the backdrop of the approaching 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, casting El-Sayed as facing renewed political scrutiny as his campaign heats up and he’s forced to address the posts amid a historically unifying moment in American politics.

A spokesperson for El-Sayed’s campaign said in a statement to CBS News that “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” adding that his opponent, Mike Rogers, is engaged in “bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”

The Hollywood Reporter reached out to El-Sayed’s campaign for comment on the controversy but did not hear back Tuesday.

Weiss, a longtime lightning rod for controversy, was elevated to CBS News editor-in-chief last year by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and Trump megadonor Larry Ellison.