Top Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, and Laura Ingraham all amplified an August 31 CBS News report that relied on innuendo and Islamophobia to falsely imply that Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed had made disrespectful comments about the victims of 9/11. In fact, as Media Matters reported, El-Sayed’s comments — which urged the United States to respond to the growing death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic with a whole-of-government approach — were entirely in line with mainstream discourse at the time and mirror some statements made by figures at Fox News. 

El-Sayed, who is a former public health official and is Muslim, made the remarks on social media in posts that are now deleted (as are all of the candidate’s posts prior to July 2023). In one of the posts, CBS News reported that 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,” while another argued that the U.S. government should “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty” rather than waging wars in the Middle East. In a third post, El-Sayed mourned the loss of life on 9/11 and those killed by the United States’ so-called war on terror.

Even by CBS’s own reporting, none of the posts show disdain for those who died on 9/11 or make any justification for the attacks that day. Instead, CBS’s framing simply serves as a subconscious link between El-Sayed and terrorism, thus giving conservative pundits an imaginary outrage to fuel their Islamophobic fearmongering. 

Host Sean Hannity displayed the headline of the CBS News article, arguing that “El-Sayed seems to be creating a moral equivalency here, thinking that America — what — does far more harm than al-Qaeda?”

Hannity went on to suggest that El-Sayed “doesn’t love America” and claimed he “has regularly attacked this country.”

Hannity’s colleagues didn’t reference the CBS News story directly, but both mentioned El-Sayed’s old tweets in an implicit nod to the legacy outlet’s coverage.

Watters claimed that El-Sayed was “scrambling to delete tweets from 9/11,” suggested he “is hiding a lot” and “is not who he says he is,” and warned that he wants to “knock America down to size.”

Similarly, Ingraham grossly mischaracterized El-Sayed’s posts to claim “he was never really vetted,” saying that “the Democrats could have made a big deal about his 9/11 tweets where he showed such utter disdain for American suffering, but they didn’t.” Now, she said, he “thinks he can snap his fingers and make his radicalism disappear.” 

The pipeline here is clear: CBS News laundered perfectly innocuous comments into the newscycle and Fox News further decontextualized them to falsely paint El-Sayed as callous toward the victims of 9/11 at best, or supportive of violence against the United States at worst. 

But contrary to the pose taken by these Fox News hosts, making comparisons between the pandemic and 9/11 was entirely common in 2020 and 2021, including by right-wing media figures, public officials, and even President Donald Trump. As Media Matters previously highlighted:

• 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.”
• Former Fox News host Neil Cavuto: “Yesterday, we had a record number of deaths in this country, more than died on 9/11.”
• 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 April 2020, Trump’s surgeon general said the pandemic would be “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment.” 
• 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.” 

If the CBS News report was welcomed at Fox News, the story found a much more critical response internally. 

According to Status’ Oliver Darcy, the CBS News article was widely denounced by former and current staff, with some raising the issue with the standards department. Many in the “newsroom viewed the story with disdain, believing it served as yet another blemish calling into question the organization's objectivity under new ownership,” and one former staffer told Status: “The racism is overt.” Bari Weiss, the conservative journalist who now serves as CBS News’ editor-in-chief, reportedly “praised the story” and “personally directed that the headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

Weiss was installed at CBS News when its new owner David Ellison took over in 2025, despite her having no experience in broadcast news. Her tenure has been marked by a dismemberment of journalistic standards and an unmistakable rightward turn at the outlet. 

As a result, CBS News, once one of the most respected legacy media outlets in the country, has been reduced to concocting outrage fodder for Fox News. From the point of view of David Ellison and his billionaire father Larry Ellison — a major Trump donor and backer of his son’s media operation — that’s money well spent.