CBS News Says Abdul El-Sayed Is the Real Victim of 9/11

Twenty-five years out from the worst attack on American soil in our lifetimes, and CBS finds a way to make it about the guy running for Senate in Michigan. Not the firefighters who went up the stairs while everyone else went down. Not the families still doing the math on birthdays their kids never had. Abdul El-Sayed. That's the story someone in that newsroom decided was worth telling in the run-up to the anniversary.

There's a whole genre of this now, where any mention of 9/11 has to be immediately hedged with a reminder that Muslims faced backlash too, as if the two things carry equal weight on the day we bury the dead. Backlash happened, and it was wrong when it targeted innocent people. Nobody serious disputes that. But there's a difference between acknowledging that and structuring a piece around a Senate candidate's grievance in the week we're supposed to be remembering almost three thousand people who went to work and didn't come home.

This is what happens when a newsroom decides the anniversary needs a fresh angle instead of just letting the day be what it is. Somebody pitched this, somebody edited it, somebody put it on the air, and nobody along that chain stopped to ask whether a political candidate's feelings belong anywhere near the center of a 9/11 retrospective. That's not journalism finding a nuance. That's a newsroom that would rather talk about anything except the men who flew planes into buildings and the country that buried the people inside them.

You can respect the real history of post-9/11 backlash and still think this is a grotesque way to spend the week of the anniversary. Those two positions aren't in tension. What's actually happening is simpler and less flattering to CBS: they found a current political story and grafted it onto a national tragedy because it was there. The dead deserved better than being a backdrop.