CBS Boss Bari Weiss Has Committed ‘Serious Resources’ to Try to Link Abdul El-Sayed With Muslim Brotherhood: Report
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss personally pushed the network to devote “serious resources” to investigating whether Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, according to a new Semafor report.
Staffers told Semafor’s Max Tani on Sunday that Weiss repeatedly encouraged journalists to pursue possible links between El-Sayed and the Islamist movement, raising the subject on editorial calls and assigning CBS’s investigative unit to comb through the candidate’s background.
The team is expected to publish a story in the coming days, although two people familiar with the reporting told Semafor it remained unclear as of Sunday afternoon whether it would contain any new revelations.
Semafor, however, reported that Weiss has taken an unusually “hands-on” role in the story, pushing multiple angles to find El-Sayed’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Some CBS staffers also privately complained that Weiss gives particular attention to theories about progressive candidates that originate on social media or in conservative outlets, while not applying equivalent scrutiny to Republicans.
In a statement to Mediaite, a CBS spokesperson strongly rejected the characterization:
CBS News has been delivering best-in-class breaking news and exclusive, impactful reporting on immigration, Cornell, the Iran War, the Russia-Ukraine war, and much more.
Our Middle East reporting and coverage of the midterms has been just as rigorous. We’ll let our journalism – not baseless accusations – speak for itself.
Notably, the network is hardly alone in pressing El-Sayed on the question. NBC News anchors Tom Llamas and Kristen Welker have questioned him about the allegations, while MS NOW host Ali Velshi raised the subject in an interview Saturday.
The scrutiny around El-Sayed centers in part on a 2012 social-media post by El-Sayed’s younger half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, who wrote about having “an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s.”
El-Sayed, who is Muslim and of Egyptian descent, has repeatedly denied belonging to or anyone in his family having ties to the group. He called attempts to infer a connection from his family history “insane,” adding that he did not “know what my mother was doing in Egypt in the 1970s.”
New: The Mediaite One-Sheet “Newsletter of Newsletters”
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!