NEWSBari Weiss Faces CBS News Backlash Over Abdul El-Sayed 9/11 Headline: Report
Bari Weiss faced internal backlash over a controversial CBS News headline about Abdul El-Sayed.
Sept. 5 2026, Published 7:16 a.m. ET
Bari Weiss is facing another newsroom flare-up at CBS News.
The CBS News editor-in-chief drew internal backlash after a story about Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, highlighted deleted tweets in which he compared the toll of COVID-19 to the September 11 attacks.
A source told The Hollywood Reporter Weiss praised the story in a Monday morning editorial meeting and directed that its headline be reworked. The final headline read, “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on September 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”
Inside the Headline Fight
CBS staffers reportedly criticized the story for amplifying deleted social media posts.
The original headline, according to THR, was, “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks.” A source familiar with the edit process told the outlet Weiss changed it to mention the deleted tweets and the September 11 attacks more directly.
The reaction was swift inside and outside the network. One senior CBS News staffer told Status the story was “a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up.”
Status reported that current and former CBS staffers also criticized the piece, with one former senior staffer calling it “shameful.”
What Abdul El-Sayed Posted
Abdul El-Sayed’s past posts compared the COVID-19 death toll to the September 11 attacks.
The tweets at the center of the story were written during the pandemic. In one, El-Sayed noted that COVID-19 had killed more Americans than the September 11 attacks and argued for a national public health response with the urgency of the post-9/11 mobilization.
In another September 11, 2021 post, he mourned those killed and injured in the attacks, then criticized the devastation of the wars that followed.
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The Michigan Senate candidate said his older posts were deleted to prevent them from being taken out of context.
El-Sayed’s campaign has said he deleted all posts from before July 2023 to prevent old comments from being taken out of context. His campaign told CBS News that “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” and accused opponent Mike Rogers of “bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”
CBS Defends the Story
CBS News defended its reporting as criticism over the headline continued.
A source familiar with CBS News’ editing process defended the piece to The Daily Beast, saying stories about politicians’ deleted tweets are common and that El-Sayed had not explained the deletions at publication time.
“We later published an on-camera interview with El-Sayed who gave a comprehensive response to the piece,” the source said.
Critics, like Atlantic writer Helen Lewis, said the headline “reads like a dog whistle.”
“Anyone discussing this race needs to be very careful about putting the name of a man who would be America's first Muslim senator next to ‘9/11’ on very thin grounds,” she wrote on X.
The controversy lands as Weiss remains under scrutiny since taking over CBS News after David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance elevated her and acquired The Free Press, the outlet she founded.
