CBS Ties a Muslim Candidate to 9/11 and Calls It News
Abdul El-Sayed did not delete tweets to hide disrespect for 9/11. He deleted them to stop old words from being pulled out of context.
Abdul El-Sayed did not delete tweets to hide disrespect for 9/11. He deleted them to stop old words from being pulled out of context. That is what his campaign said. CBS News ran a headline that made it look like the opposite. The left called it blatantly racist. I have seen this play before. The headline does the work the facts cannot do.
The headline and what it hides
The CBS piece carried this line: “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.” It appeared as the 25th anniversary of the attacks neared. Timing matters in markets and in politics. A story like this lands harder when the calendar is loaded.
The article cited two deleted posts. One from April 2020 compared the nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11 to the rising COVID death toll and urged a mobilization for public health and poverty like the post-9/11 war on terror. Another from September 11, 2021 said he mourned the 3,000 lives and thousands of injuries in New York “perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” then said he would also mourn about a million lives and millions of injuries across three countries “perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.” His campaign told outlets he deleted all posts older than July 2023 to avoid context traps. They did not say when these two posts were deleted.
The headline frames the deletion as the news. The posts themselves are not new. One was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon earlier in the summer. CBS chose to put “deleted tweets” and “Sept. 11 attacks” together in the headline. According to reports, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss personally directed that the headline be tweaked to specifically mention the deleted tweets referencing 9/11. That detail turns a routine archive story into something that reads like a warning.
The reaction and the pattern
The response was fast. Representative Yassamin Ansari called the headline “insane, blatantly racist.” Other Democrats and journalists said the piece used a thin premise to place a Muslim candidate’s name next to 9/11 and let the implication do the rest. Some CBS staff pushed back internally, calling the story shameful and overtly racist. A CBS source told Fox News Digital that reports on deleted posts from politicians happen all the time. That may be true. It does not answer why this one leaned so hard on the anniversary and the word “deleted.”
There is a market version of this. A company times an offering before a holiday. A bank releases bad news during a long weekend. The goal is not to lie. The goal is to let the noise carry the message. In this case, the message is simple. Put a Muslim candidate near 9/11 in a headline and watch what happens. The facts can be clean and the frame can still do damage.
CBS later adjusted the headline to focus more on the tweets themselves. The original social post read, “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.” That language sets a tone before a reader sees a single quote. Tone is a price. Someone pays it.
What is known and what is not
Here is what is documented. CBS published a report about El-Sayed’s deleted social media posts on 9/11. The left criticized the headline as blatantly racist. El-Sayed’s campaign said he deleted older posts to prevent context problems. Reports say Weiss personally directed the headline change to highlight the deleted tweets referencing 9/11. A person familiar with the story told outlets there was nothing racist or Islamophobic about reporting on the posts.
Here is what is not settled. Whether the headline fairly reflects the content of the posts. Whether the criticism is proportionate. Whether the edit was standard news judgment or something else. I do not work inside CBS. I do not know what was said in the editorial meeting. I only know what the headline said and what it did.
I have watched markets long enough to know that timing is a signal. When a story drops as an anniversary approaches, it is not an accident. When a headline puts “deleted” and “9/11” in the same breath, it is not neutral. The facts can be true and the frame can still tilt the field. That is how these things work.
El-Sayed is a former public health official and a practicing Muslim. He is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. The posts in question asked Americans to treat pandemic deaths with the same urgency as 9/11 and mourned victims of the wars that followed. Those are not secret views. Many leaders compared COVID deaths to 9/11 in 2020. The difference here is the headline and the timing.
Markets price risk. Politics prices trust. When a major news brand puts a frame on a candidate that reads like a dog whistle, the cost shows up later. Not in a ticker. In polls. In donations. In the kind of stories that follow. I do not need to forecast the race to see the shape of this. The headline did its job. The question is what the bill will be.