CBS journalists leak revolt over Bari Weiss order to probe El-Sayed Muslim Brotherhood ties
Candidate denies movement links while sister's own posts describe family activism, newsroom grievances travel through anonymous quotes to rival outlets
Images
Leaks prove CBS News staffers object to notion of balanced news, watchdog says
foxnews.com
Bari Weiss, Abdul El-Sayed
foxnews.com
Abdul El-Sayed NBC News interview
foxnews.com
NBC's Tom Llamas grills Abdul El-Sayed on alleged family ties to Muslim Brotherhood
foxnews.com
CBS News journalists are leaking complaints about their own editor-in-chief to rival outlets after she asked them to investigate a Senate candidate's alleged family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Semafor reported on Sunday that Bari Weiss, who runs CBS News, personally pushed staff to pursue story angles on Abdul El-Sayed's supposed sympathies toward the Islamist movement. El-Sayed is a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan.
The Semafor report cited two anonymous CBS News staffers who said they were aggrieved by the directive. The episode follows a controversy that CBS News largely declined to cover: social media posts unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon in which El-Sayed's half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a professor at the University of Chicago, described her family — including the candidate's mother — as having long-standing Muslim Brotherhood ties. In one 2012 post, Abdelhadi wrote about her mother's activism in the Brotherhood during the early 1970s at Egypt's Alexandria University, an institution where the movement was active in that era. El-Sayed flatly denied any connection in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker, and grew agitated with a reporter who pressed him on the family links.
The reaction splits along predictable lines. Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host who runs Zeteo, called Weiss a 'rightwing, pro-Israel, anti-Muslim troll' with 'zero qualifications' running a national network. The Nation's Jeet Heer wrote that no self-respecting journalist should work for her. On the other side, NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham noted that staffers leaking to liberal publications to smear their boss says as much about the newsroom as about Weiss. Her defenders argue the staff are upset mainly at being asked to do journalism on a story that reflects poorly on a Democrat.
The underlying facts — the sister's own posts — predate Weiss's arrival at CBS and were not seriously disputed by anyone involved. What the leak war establishes is which stories a news organization's own employees believe may be pursued, and the answer at CBS News now depends less on the evidence than on the party affiliation of the subject.