CBS Staffers Claim Bari Weiss Wanted More ‘Sensationalized’ 9/11 Story Headline

CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is under fire from her own staffers, who claim she wanted an even more “sensationalized” headline on the recent story about Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted September 11 tweets.

According to the Substack newsletter Zeteo, three CBS sources claimed there is anger inside the newsroom over the article and the social media post the network published to promote it. A CBS staffer told the outlet, “Yeah, it’s trash. The article itself is also horribly Islamophobic.”

The article was published on CBSNews.com on August 31 under the headline, “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

“As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack,” the first paragraph of the article reads. This same sentence was included in the network’s X post linking to the piece.

Another network insider told Zeteo, “What the heck does 9/11 have to do with Abdul [El-Sayed]?”

According to Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, Weiss praised the story during a Monday (August 31) editorial meeting. She also reportedly directed the headline to note that El-Sayed had deleted the tweets.

A person familiar with the situation told The New Republic that the original headline read, “For Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Sept. 11 commemoration invites scrutiny of past remarks.”

Three CBS sources told Zeteo that Weiss went even further, suggesting the headline be made even more “sensationalized,” though they didn’t specify what those changes were.

Another source disputed this account, telling the outlet that Weiss simply wanted the headline to be “more accurate.”

Status also reported that senior staffers took their objections to the network’s standards department, but little came of it.

“They took a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” a CBS News employee told Status.

A former senior CBS News staffer called the article “shameful,” adding, “The racism is overt.”

As for the tweets in question, El-Sayed, a public health official at the time, compared the rising COVID-19 death toll to the almost 3,000 killed in the 9/11 terror attacks. He demanded that the government respond to the pandemic on the same scale, per Media Matters.