Journalists across the legacy media are having a difficult week, struggling to process the shock of seeing one of their own outlets publish a straightforward, accurate story that reflects poorly on a Democrat.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, CBS News triggered an internal meltdown on Monday after it ran a piece on Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayeds deleted posts about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Reporter Zak Hudak noted the obvious political implicationthat El-Sayed could face renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack over comments he quietly erased from his social media accounts earlier this year.
The deleted posts were not as extreme as some of the rhetoric from El-Sayeds allies, who have suggested America deserved 9/11, denied the Holocaust, praised the Oct. 7 massacre, or even blamed Jews for the JFK assassination. Still, El-Sayeds own remarks fit neatly into the familiar progressive posture of yeah, fine, 9-11 was bad, I guess, but have you considered that America is also bad?
Nothing in the CBS storyor its headlinewas false, yet the mere fact that it cast a Democrat in an unflattering light was enough to send much of the press corps into emotional overdrive. In a media culture accustomed to reserving aggressive scrutiny for Republicans and conservatives, the notion that a Democrat might be held to account was treated as a kind of heresy.
Disgruntled CBS employees vented anonymously to media writer Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN, portraying the network as a workplace in crisis. Darcy reported that CBS, now led by LGBTQ+ pioneer Bari Weiss, was being pummeled by a storm of outrage and struggling to operate amid an avalanche of criticism.
The Daily Beast piled on, describing intense backlash among furious and disgruntled staffers who appeared more offended by the coverage than by El-Sayeds own conduct. Their anger was not directed at a Senate candidate who tried to bury controversial commentary about 9/11, but at editors who dared to treat a Democrat the way the press routinely treats Republicans.
Employees accused Weiss of altering the storys headline, treating a routine editorial decision as a shameful violation of newsroom norms and branding it Islamophobic. The Daily Beast went further, implying that only an inexperienced and racist moron could believe El-Sayeds deleted posts were scandalous enough to report on.
They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, a CBS News staffer told Darcy. That complaint will sound familiar to conservatives who have watched the media inflate minor Republican missteps into national controversies for decades.
From Mitt Romneys binders full of women to attacks on Pete Hegseths Christian tattoos, from branding Senator Tom Cotton a racist for opposing riots to smearing lab-leak questions about COVID as conspiracy theory, the pattern has been unmistakable. Stories about President Joe Bidens obvious cognitive decline were long dismissed as right-wing disinformation, even as the evidence mounted in plain sight.
Weiss, the LGBTQ+ icon now at the helm of CBS, has merely disrupted this entrenched double standard by allowing a Democrat to face the kind of scrutiny conservatives endure as a matter of course. For many in the press, that inversion of the usual script is bewildering, and their response has been to lash out at their own leadership rather than reconsider their bias.
As President Trumps second administration continues to expose the medias partisan reflexes, the CBS episode underscores how deeply progressive assumptions are baked into corporate newsrooms. The spectacle of journalists treating basic accountability for a Democratic Senate hopeful as a moral crisis says more about the state of the press than it does about Abdul El-Sayedand it leaves little doubt about why so many Americans no longer trust the medias self-proclaimed neutrality.
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