Bari Weiss
The piece’s headline appeared designed to suggest that El-Sayed, who is Muslim, had disrespected the victims of the attacks or had somehow justified them. Even by CBS News' account, El-Sayed simply invoked the 9/11 death toll while discussing surging deaths during the pandemic and hoped for a strong response across the country to help Americans.
In one of the posts reported by CBS, El-Sayed “compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization.” A different post similarly called for the United States to “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In another, El-Sayed mourned the loss of life on 9/11 and in the United States’ reaction to the attacks, which devastated countries across the Middle East.
Contrary to CBS News’ innuendo, many public figures compared the death tolls of COVID and 9/11.
- In April 2020, President Donald Trump’s surgeon general said the pandemic would be “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.”
- Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, said in March 2020 that COVID “reminds me of 9/11 where one moment, which was inconceivable, just changed everything.”
- In May 2020, Trump said: “This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There's never been an attack like this.”
- In January 2021, Dr. Robert Redfield, then the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said “that we were going to be in for day after day after day — back in early December, of losing more people than we lost in Pearl Harbor and 9/11 every day.”
- Fox News’ Neil Cavuto: “Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11.”
- Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld: “In that case, this virus is much like 9/11. … So we have to think about this the same way we think about terrorism and thinking about 9/11.”
- Like El-Sayed, comedian Chris Rock hoped that the government would respond forcefully to the pandemic. “I just hope that all that’s happened, that this whole year was not in vain, and that people and the government doesn’t just go back to business as usual,” he said in December 2020. “Like, basically, there’s a 9/11 every day.”
CBS News’ Islamophobic framing comes amid a rising wave of anti-Muslim animus in right-wing media, and illustrates how that kind of bigotry can easily migrate to once-respected media organizations. The outlet has lurched to the right under its new owner, David Ellison, and Weiss, a conservative journalist with no experience in broadcast news.
The Ellison-Weiss smash-and-grab has resulted in low morale at CBS News and several high-profile resignations, including veteran journalist Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. In an interview with The New York Times, Pelley claimed that Weiss had asked him to revise a February segment on demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deadly crackdown in Minneapolis to “make the protesters look more violent.” Weiss had previously spiked a segment on the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in a move many interpreted as her attempt to kill a story that made the Trump administration look bad. (The segment eventually aired in early 2026.)
Ellison’s company, Paramount Skydance, is currently attempting to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN. Should the deal eventually go through, there is every reason to believe Ellison would introduce the kind of chaos and political bias at CNN that he and his deputies have brought to CBS News.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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