CBS News drew fierce backlash from progressive commentators and a sitting congresswoman after publishing a report on deleted social media posts by Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, posts that equated America's response to 9/11 with the attacks themselves.
The network's report noted that as the nation prepares to mark 25 years since September 11, 2001, El-Sayed "may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack" over social media posts he later scrubbed from the internet. Among them: a September 11, 2021 post in which El-Sayed mourned "the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith," then pivoted to say he would next mourn "~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country." The Washington Free Beacon first uncovered that post. CBS News also cited additional deleted posts from 2020 in which El-Sayed compared 9/11 deaths to deaths from the coronavirus pandemic.
Rather than focus on what El-Sayed actually wrote, and why he deleted it, a chorus of left-leaning media figures and politicians turned their fire on CBS News for daring to cover the story at all.
Mehdi Hasan, the Zeteo founder and former MSNBC host, directed a post at CBS News and its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss:
"Hi @CBS @CBSNews @bariweiss do you think it's super offensive and disgusting and Islamophobic to do a tweet about the potential first ever Muslim Democratic senator which begins by referencing 9/11?"
Commentator Hasan Piker went further, Fox News Digital reported, tying the coverage directly to CBS News's ownership change. "What an insane headline," Piker wrote on X. "This is why the [new Paramount owner David Ellison] bought CBS and put Bari Weiss in charge." Weiss was tapped last fall to lead CBS News as part of Paramount's multimillion-dollar acquisition of her outlet, The Free Press.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat from Arizona, called the CBS headline "insane, blatantly racist" and added, "Unreal." Tim Miller, host of The Bulwark podcast, labeled the coverage "despicable anti-Muslim woke right garbage from the house CBS account."
Notice the pattern. Not one of these critics engaged with the substance of El-Sayed's deleted posts. Not one addressed why a Senate candidate would pen those words on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on American soil, and then quietly erase them. The entire response was an attempt to make the reporter, not the candidate, the story.
When a local CBS News reporter confronted El-Sayed on the campaign trail about the deleted posts, the candidate offered a carefully worded answer:
"What happened on 9/11 is a disaster. It was a terrible attack on our country. And our responsibility is also to think about, how do we build an America where we are protecting our servicemen and women from being asked to fight in wars we have no business fighting in?"
That statement is measured. His deleted post was not. In the 2021 post, El-Sayed drew a direct moral equivalence between the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered by terrorists and what he characterized as roughly one million lives lost in three unspecified countries, casualties he attributed to actions taken "in the name of my country." He described the 9/11 attacks as having been "perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith," language that frames the mass murder of civilians as a misunderstanding rather than an act of deliberate ideological violence.
The fact that El-Sayed deleted the post suggests he understood, at some point, that it would not play well with Michigan voters, or with the broader American public that still remembers that morning. The question CBS News raised was legitimate: should voters know what a Senate candidate said about 9/11 before he scrubbed the record? That is not Islamophobia. That is journalism.
Internal tensions within the Democratic Party over how to handle candidates whose past statements create political liabilities are nothing new. The same dynamic has played out in recent warnings from veteran Democrats that the party risks being defined by its most radical voices if mainstream leaders do not push back.
A CBS News source familiar with the story told Fox News Digital that reports about deleted social media posts from politicians are published "all the time." That is accurate. News organizations regularly report on candidates' deleted statements, and the practice has never before been treated as bigotry, at least not when the candidate in question was a Republican.
CBS News did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's broader request for comment on the backlash.
Astead Herndon, the Vox host and editorial director, offered a more measured but still telling reaction. "The current state of institutional media legit bums me out," Herndon wrote. "We've burned through so much credibility in recent years. And our information ecosystem is worse for it." Herndon did not specify whether the credibility problem he identified was the reporting itself or the reflexive pile-on against it, but the ambiguity is itself revealing. When a media figure cannot plainly say that reporting a candidate's own deleted words is fair game, the profession has a problem that runs deeper than any single story.
The rush to blame Bari Weiss personally is worth examining. Critics pointed to her appointment as CBS News editor-in-chief as proof that the network had shifted rightward. But the report in question did something straightforward: it surfaced a candidate's own statements, presented them in context, and asked the candidate to respond. If that qualifies as right-wing bias, then the standard these critics are defending is one in which certain candidates are simply exempt from scrutiny based on their identity, a standard that would make honest political coverage of Senate races all but impossible.
Fox News contributor Hugh Hewitt assessed El-Sayed's broader challenge on "America Reports," noting the candidate's struggle to win over Jewish voters after remarks critics have described as antisemitic. That assessment points to a pattern: El-Sayed's deleted 9/11 posts are not an isolated incident but part of a record that Michigan voters deserve to evaluate before heading to the polls.
Senate races across the country have become flashpoints for exactly this kind of accountability fight. Whether it involves legislative battles over election integrity or candidates' own words coming back to haunt them, voters consistently say they want transparency, not protection from uncomfortable truths.
El-Sayed wrote what he wrote. He published it on the anniversary of 9/11. He deleted it. CBS News found it and reported it. Every one of those steps is verifiable. The only people who treated any of it as scandalous were the ones angry that a news organization did its job.
The pattern of institutions facing pressure to look the other way when politically inconvenient facts surface is not limited to media. It extends across government, from federal prosecutors building cases from public statements to election disputes that reach the highest courts. In each case, the same principle applies: public figures do not get to memory-hole their records and then cry foul when someone pulls the receipts, pulls the evidence.
A man who wants to represent Michigan in the United States Senate drew a moral equivalence between the murder of 3,000 Americans and the foreign policy of the country he now asks to serve. He deleted the post. His allies attacked the reporter. And not one of them has explained what, exactly, was wrong about telling voters the truth.