Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whose own state borders Canada, on Monday slammed the recent trade tensions between the Trump administration and its northern neighbor. “Now, over the last couple of weeks, Michiganders…
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Lawmakers call CBS's headline on El-Sayed 'blatantly racist' days after he called out a trade war.
As it ran on the front
You want to see how the con works? Watch the order of operations, because the order is the whole trick. A Muslim state lawmaker says out loud that starting a trade war with your closest neighbor makes you the a-hole — his word, not mine, and he's not wrong, go ask anybody who's bought groceries lately. A couple days later, the headline isn't about the tariffs anymore. It's about him. Lawmakers and reporters are calling it — and I'm using their language here, not mine — 'insane' and 'blatantly racist.' That's not a stray comment from some crank account. That's a network's own headline desk deciding the story wasn't the trade war after all. The story was the guy's name.
This is the oldest move in the coverage business: you can't win the argument, so you make the arguer the argument. Nobody's out there disputing that the tariffs raised prices. Nobody's disputing his math. So instead the whole segment turns into a referendum on how he phrased it, and within about forty-eight hours the guy who called out the trade war is doing more damage control than the people who actually started the trade war.…
…(cont) I have watched this move my entire adult life. Somebody points at a fire, and the fire department shows up to investigate the finger. Meanwhile the fire keeps right on burning. And this fire, the trade war one, keeps collecting its toll at the register, on the stuff that used to be cheaper, the stuff you don't do the math on until you're standing there holding it wondering when it got like this.
So here's what actually happened, in the order it happened: a guy stated the obvious, a network ran a headline that lawmakers on both sides called blatantly racist, and the trade war he was talking about didn't get mentioned again in the same news cycle. You're supposed to walk away mad about the phrasing. I want you to walk away noticing what quietly left the conversation — the tariffs, the price tag, the guy who was right.
That's the actual stakes here. Not who said what about whom on a livestream somewhere. Whether the guy who told you the truth about your grocery bill gets to keep saying it out loud, or whether he spends the next news cycle explaining his own sentence instead of the number on your receipt.
“They can't beat the man's point about the trade war, so they make his sentence the story instead. Been the move since forever — you can't win the argument, so you put the arguer on trial. The tariffs don't stop costing you money just because the headline changed the subject.”
“The headline was an editing oversight, nothing more, and CBS has addressed it — I assume they've addressed it. And frankly, the congressman's language wasn't exactly statesmanlike either, calling people names like that, so there's blame on both sides here. Wait, did I just both-sides a headline lawmakers called blatantly racist? That's not — let's move on.”
The receipts
Several Democratic lawmakers on Monday slammed CBS News for publishing a news analysis linking Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The CBS story claimed that El-Sayed "may be facing the risk…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.