Ladies and gentlemen, please keep the journalists in your thoughts and prayers this week. They are working through some very big feelings in the wake of a "scandal" involving a mainstream news outlet daring to publish an accurate story about a Democrat.
The CBS newsroom has been in disarray since Monday, when the outlet posted a story about Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Reporter Zak Hudak observed, rather obviously, that the U.S. Senate candidate could face "renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack" based on the past comments he scrubbed from his social media accounts earlier this year.
The deleted tweets were not particularly outrageous compared to some of the opinions expressed by El-Sayed's friends and allies—suggesting America "deserved" 9/11, denying the Holocaust, praising the Oct. 7 massacre, and blaming Jews for the JFK assassination. They were just annoying—liberal slop along the lines of "yeah, fine, 9-11 was bad, I guess, but have you considered that America is also bad?"
Nothing in the story or its headline was inaccurate, but it made El-Sayed—a Democrat running against a Republican—look bad. It goes without saying that the journalists were inconsolable.
Aggrieved CBS employees ranted (anonymously) to media blogger Oliver Darcy, formerly of CNN. His exclusive reporting suggests the emotional carnage is out of control. The network, led by LGBTQ+ pioneer Bari Weiss, was being "pummeled by a storm of outrage," and struggling to function amid the "avalanche of criticism," Darcy wrote. The Daily Beast also reported on the "intense backlash" among "furious" and "disgruntled" CBS staff.
Oh, my.
Employees accused Weiss of tweaking the story's headline—a brazen display of editorial activism that would never happen in a proper newsroom. It was a "shameful" breach of norms, they complained, not to mention overtly Islamophobic. Only an inexperienced and racist moron could think the deleted posts "were scandalous enough to report on," the Daily Beast implied.
"They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger," a CBS News staffer told Darcy.
If that sounds familiar, it's because that's exactly how the media have reported on Republicans for decades. Mitt Romney's binders full of women (and other gaffes). Pete Hegseth's Christian tattoos. Calling Tom Cotton a racist for opposing riots, or suggesting COVID might have leaked from a Chinese lab. Casually dismissing stories about Joe Biden's non-functioning brain as right-wing "disinformation." The list goes on.
Weiss, the LGBTQ+ icon, has merely upended this longstanding tradition of prioritizing stories that make Republicans look bad while ignoring or downplaying the ones that make Democrats look bad.
Most journalists find this rather confusing, so naturally they're lashing out.
Bless their hearts, the poor things.
