It did not take a lot of special insight to suspect that recently installed CBS News boss Bari Weiss played some role in the production of a story the outlet ran on Monday, headlined "Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks." If you know even a little bit about Weiss, you know that such a story combines two of her favorite things: talking about people's old tweets and blatant Islamophobia.
That suspicion was confirmed Monday night by Status News, which reported that Weiss was so impressed by the story she specifically praised it during the network's daily editorial meeting on Monday. She also personally directed a change in the headline to include explicit reference to El-Sayed, deleted posts, and 9/11, according to sources who spoke with Status.
This has apparently caused some outrage among CBS staffers who noted, along with many others who read the story, that the whole thing is stupid and shamelessly racist. The posts in question are completely anodyne, which is obvious even in the way the story describes them:
In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 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."
They were also deleted not for any nefarious reasons, but along with every other post El-Sayed made prior to 2023, according to his campaign.
Of course, that isn't the point of the story, or its menacing headline. The point is to put the name Abdul El-Sayed as close as possible to the words "Sept. 11." Do that often enough, and eventually people will make their own associations. But Weiss is never as clever as she thinks she is, and this typically sweaty attempt was so heavy-handed that it provoked a wave of criticism.
So here's a tip for Weiss: Next time, because there will be a next time, try a bit of subtlety here. Investigate his morning routine. Does El-Sayed drink coffee at 9 and have breakfast at 11? Find a set of very tall twins from Lansing who tower over him. Surely there's a campaign headquarters janitor who can dutifully report that his bins are laden with trash. She already employs the perfect reporter for the job.
