CBS is gone

17.5 yrs
~ 2 weeks, 0 days ago

CBS is gone

Maybe if she had added the tagline "just my opinion and not my employer's"?

CBS reporter apologizes and deletes post praising Abdul El-Sayed heckler
Jan Crawford had praised man who asked Democratic candidate whether he would disavow Muslim Brotherhood
www.theguardian.com/ media/2026/oct/18/cb s-reporter-apologize s-abdul-el-saye
CBS's chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford has apologized for and deleted a social media post praising a man who questioned Democratic Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood during a town hall on Saturday.

On Sunday, Crawford, who initially joined CBS in 2009, wrote 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."

Crawford's deleted post had thanked a man named Tommy while also 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."

The video to which Crawford referred showed the man who identified himself only as Tommy asking El-Sayed: "Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?"

In response, El-Sayed said: "Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Why are you asking the question?"

Tommy replied: "Well, because they're a terrorist group." El-Sayed then rejoined, "But what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn't?

"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."

Crawford's tweet evidently generated substantial backlash from within CBS and among other members of the news media.

The Guardian's media reporter Jeremy Barr wrote on X on Sunday: "I'm told there was a lot of internal backlash at CBS News to the Jan Crawford tweet - which may be why she deleted it."

Meanwhile, journalist AJ Katz wrote: "Jan Crawford is CBS News' chief legal correspondent, not an opinion commentator. Pretty striking language from a broadcast network news journalist about a Democratic senate candidate on her public account."

Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor said in part: "Very strange editorializing from a chief legal correspondent!"

Meanwhile, CNN political commentator Karen Finney wrote that Crawford had been "caught red handed" trying to help "spread false, racist lies about Abdul because he is Muslim".

"Shame on you," Finney also wrote.

FASTLANE: This "Fastlane" discussion may cover sensitive, inflammatory, or controversial topics. See Fastlane guidelines »

Replies:

15 yrs
~ 1 week, 7 days ago

*Edited

mypeez :
Re: "My opinion and mine alone and not my employer's "

I put that tagline in because it is required by the corporation that owns my workplace. Has nothing to do with CBS. The reporter did the right thing to delete the post and apologize, because she's at the network level and on camera.
I'm just a guy behind the camera, and only for for a few more months.

RambleOn reacted

17.5 yrs
~ 1 week, 6 days ago

DennisinPeoria : I was just following orders didn't work at Nuremberg. Your parent company's new ownership has some real issues with journalistic integrity of late.

Bari Weiss Exposed for Pushing CBS to Smear Democratic Candidates
Malcolm Ferguson
Mon, October 19, 2026 at 8:21 AM CDT

CBS News editor in chief and anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss urged her newsroom to cover right-wing conspiracy theories regarding Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed.

Semafor reported that Weiss was particularly focused on El-Sayed's (nonexistent) ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and 9/11, and Talarico's (also nonexistent) trip to a mental health facility. El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim, has denounced the Muslim Brotherhood numerous times amid Islamophobic attacks from both the right wing and the Democratic establishment.

Weiss "personally advocated" for a deeper dive into El-Sayed's personal history, and she even faced internal pushback for her insistence that the newsroom inaccurately tie El-Sayed to the 9/11 terror attacks, as she published an August headline reading "Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks."

"Anyone discussing this race needs to be very careful about putting the name of a man who would be America's first Muslim senator next to '9/11' on very thin grounds. It reads like a dog whistle," Atlantic journalist Helen Lewis wrote at the time.

As for Talarico, his whole "mental health" episode was thoroughly disproven as a smear campaign, even though Weiss thought it was worth spending time on. It's notable that both Talarico and El-Sayed are progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, something that Weiss, her pro-Israel The Free Press blog, and CBS have covered with extreme bias.

This is not the first time Weiss has experienced internal pushback for inserting herself into stories. She initially pulled the plug on former 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega's CECOT megaprison story in El Salvador, and was "very, very hands-on" with a story covering Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.

15 yrs
~ 1 week, 6 days ago

WMBD is not owned by CBS. It's owned by Nexstar, has been for many years. We only carry CBS programs, sports, and news.
Watch carefully our local news and our website. You'll see that many of our regional/national news pieces come from Newsnation, not CBS anymore.
My opinion and mine alone and not my employer's.

RambleOn reacted

14.7 yrs
~ 1 week, 6 days ago

DennisinPeoria :
Technically that last post is fact, not opinion. Emoticon

PeoriaIllinoisan and DennisinPeoria reacted

17.5 yrs
~ 1 week, 5 days ago

*Edited

#msg1967953WMBD is not owned by CBS. It's owned by Nexstar, has been for many years. We only carry CBS programs, sports, and news. Watch carefully our local news and our website. You'll see that many of our regional/national news pieces come from Newsnation, not CBS anymore. My opinion and mine alone and not my employer's.

DennisinPeoria : You're not helping yourself.

Who Owns NewsNation and Does It Really Provide Unbiased Reporting?
marketrealist.com/p/ who-owns-newsnation/
... In March 2021, The New York Times reported that NewsNation hadn't lived up to expectations and was seeing low viewership. Six people at the time reportedly said that NewsNation was becoming increasingly right-wing and conservative in its presentation.

Early in 2021, news broke that Bill Shine, a former co-president of Fox News, had consulted from the beginning on the creation of NewsNation. Since NewsNation's launch, several incidents of conservative and/or pro-Trump bias have occurred.
...

RambleOn reacted

15 yrs
~ 1 week, 5 days ago

mypeez :
Tell that to the many Facebook commentators on WMBD posts that accuse that station of being liberally biased against Republicans and the President. Even though those posts are on stories that WMBD doesn't write, but comes from other sources including Newsnation and the AP. But because it's on WMBD Facebook, they assume it's staff writes it, without looking at the byline.
My opinion and mine alone.