CBS News leaders have thoughts on Abdul El-Sayed ... tonight on 60 Minutes?

Eyes will be on CBS News’ 60 Minutes on Sunday when it runs a story on the Michigan Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. Well, some eyes … fewer than there were, say, a year ago.

The scrutiny is a result of the news organization’s obvious hostility toward El-Sayed — a hostility that must pain the legitimate journalists still with the network.

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss reportedly has been urging her newsroom to find heretofore undiscovered links between El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a charge Republicans have been hurling at El-Sayed for awhile as their campaign against him has grown increasingly and blatantly racist and Islamophobic.

Weiss’ direction may help explain why CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford felt comfortable praising a man identifying himself as “Tommy” who confronted El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood during a town hall appearance in an exchange that went viral:

Tommy: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?”

El-Sayed: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But why are you asking the question?”

Tommy: “Well, because they’re a terrorist group.” 

El-Sayed: “But what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?

Tommy: “Yes.”

El-Sayed later tells Tommy:

You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right? You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow, or that I’ll have some higher order allegiance than the Constitution.

The exchange continued for several minutes, with Tommy ultimately refusing to embrace for everyone the freedom of religion guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. El-Sayed supporters were delighted with the exchange.

Crawford saw it differently. She thanked Tommy, saying: “I had to watch this twice to catch Dr Abdul El-Sayed’s nanosecond, ‘yeah, absolutely,’ response. His subsequent uninterrupted three-minute diatribe proving your exact point is the kind of spectacular self own most [people] only dream about triggering. Congrats.”

“Tommy,” the Handbasket reported, was Thomas Teepell, who served as Operations Director for Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley until February.

Crawford later deleted the post, writing on X: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”

Weiss apparently viewed Crawford’s apology for her cheerleading sufficient.

According to Oliver Darcy of Status:

Inside the network, meetings were convened about whether to discipline Crawford, but I’m told Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss ultimately vetoed any meaningful action. The apology, she determined, was enough, as Zeteo previously reported, despite other executives believing a more serious disciplinary measure was warranted.

Darcy concluded, “Suffice it to say, the finished product will certainly be examined under a microscope, given how the Weiss-led news organization has covered El-Sayed and other progressive candidates in the past.”

Interesting to me is that Crawford felt comfortable posting such a message. She’s a reporter, and while reporters may be entitled to their opinions, not in public. And perhaps a better reporter would be less convinced of their rightness.

But then, Crawford, appearing last December on Face the Nation, launched into a spirited defense of the current Supreme Court, citing what she saw as the consistency of its rulings, and decrying charges of corruption that have been widely leveled against certain justices. Again, everyone is entitled to their opinion — but not the reporter covering the Supreme Court.

Crawford’s actions probably would have been considered a fireable offense in my newsrooms. But Crawford’s newsroom under Weiss uses a different way of measuring news: an ideological measure. And Crawford’s publicly declared ideology seems to fit comfortably within the new CBS News.