CBS News’ Abdul El-Sayed Hit Piece Marks an Unsurprising New Low

It’s getting harder to tell the difference between CBS and MAGA media. That’s the goal, of course.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter.

Ever since the corporate owners of CBS first entertained the shocking idea of paying off Donald Trump to make his flimsy “news distortion” 60 Minutes lawsuit go away, we’ve been watching the once great broadcast network slowly fall to ruin.

There have been many shocking incidents since then, including the firing of late night host Stephen Colbert, the hiring of the completely unqualified right-wing opinion writer Bari Weiss to run CBS News; the “Black Thursday” bloodbath when Weiss gutted 60 Minutes by firing many of its top investigative reporters and editors; and the repeated incidents of content meddling.

This week, CBS News sunk to a new low with blatant Islamophobia masquerading as legitimate news coverage. Mainstream media largely ignored the initial CBS story, focusing instead on the controversy it ignited. But MAGA media gobbled it up. That’s the goal, of course.

In this latest incident, CBS News posted an inflammatory headline and story on its web page and Twitter (X) account (with follow-up coverage on its streaming channel) that linked Muslim U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (D-Michigan) and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

There is no link.

CBS made up a controversy to create the impression that social media posts deleted by El-Sayed somehow demonstrate that he once supported the 9/11 terrorists and is now hiding his tracks. Following good conspiracy theory practice, CBS took a complicated story and offered a dishonest, but simple take.

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Facts vs. Political Propaganda

For those interested in actual facts about the the El-Sayed posts, I suggest reading stories from Status and The New Republic. Some of the deleted posts compared COVID -9 deaths to 9/11 deaths. The journalists at Media Matters explain that here.

Good journalism was not the aim of CBS’ coverage. Instead, they aspired to partisan narrative. Let’s look more closely. CBS initially posted their story Monday morning with a social media summary that read:

Was he actually facing scrutiny, let alone renewed scrutiny as it relates to that terrible tragedy? There is no evidence he was. None. But within hours, the already questionable headline was updated with the addition of “deleted tweets” to make it even more suggestive. As Oliver Darcy reports, it was Bari Weiss herself who directed that change. The new post reads:

Darcy further reports that some CBS staffers were so outraged by the handling of the piece that they complained to the networks standards office to no avail. The CBS staffers are right. This piece isn’t solid journalism about an important campaign issue, it was a hit job by an increasingly right wing news outlet run by a talented propagandist with a well documented animus against Muslim office holders and candidates.

First Mamdani, Now El-Sayed

Just last month, Weiss’ CBS News got caught running a fabricated story about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and 9/11. Weiss’ Free Press Substack has also regularly pilloried Mamdani — now among the most popular Democrats in the country — with thinly-sourced and biased stories like Zohran Mamdani Fails the Hamas Test. The Hamas test? Come on.

That same anti-Muslim sentiment oozes from the El-Sayed stories. One recent example, that is clearly not meant as a fashion commentary reads: “There were keffiyehs as far as the eye could see. Keffiyehs on heads, keffiyehs as belts, keffiyeh-printed phone cases.” The Free Press calls Abdul Ed-Sayed “The Mamdani of the Midwest,” which coming from that outlet is not a compliment.

I asked long-time journalist Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian about all of this. She told me,

“This is a glaring departure from the stated goal of “centrist” or “non-ideological” news, which has always been a thinly disguised cover for injecting right-wing ideology. The only surprise is how unsubtle Bari Weiss has become.

The association of El Sayed with 9/11 is so blatantly racist and Islamaphobic, and the entire piece so contrived, as to lay bare the real agenda here. It’s a disgrace but the entirely predictable extension of what we have seen. It’s confirmation how far CBS has fallen and how closely it now follows the FOX model of MAGA-friendly spin.”

Rubin was correct to make the FOX / MAGA comparison because the similarity does not stop at the nature of the content, but extends to the ecosystem it feeds. This week’s story on El-Sayed has ricocheted around MAGA media just as Weiss must have intended. On Monday alone, millions had seen the story posted on the network’s Twitter account.

The CBS to MAGA Media Pipeline

The GOP has gleefully picked up the story, adding it to the party’s already busy efforts to link every Muslim in America to 9/11. Right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting shared the CBS story across its hundreds of local TV stations. Fox ran multiple stories on its platforms, each one adding layers of bigotry and lies to the CBS report. The Fox primetime coverage is exactly what you would expect. Media Matters reporter John Knefel writes:

“Host Sean Hannity displayed the headline of the CBS News article, arguing that “El-Sayed seems to be creating a moral equivalency here, thinking that America — what — does far more harm than al-Qaeda? Hannity went on to suggest that El-Sayed “doesn’t love America” and claimed he “has regularly attacked this country.”

Fox broadcast 8-31-2026

No one at CBS spoke up to say that Hannity was taking their story out of context. How could they? As a piece of propaganda it was fit for the purpose.

We are just days away from marking the 25th anniversary of the horrific 9/11 attacks on America that killed 3,000 people and led to a devastating, decades-long war in the Middle East. Instead of reporting on this milestone with clarity, accuracy, and dignity, Weiss and CBS have opted to abuse the memory of the victims for partisan ends, sliming a political candidate in the process.

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