Conservatives slammed Gov. Kathy Hochul for wearing a headscarf during a visit to an Islamic center in New York City over the weekend.
Page A2From§Eachthe late evening edition — 31 August 2026
Conservatives slam Hochul for wearing a head scarf; CBS draws fire for 'racist' headline on El-Sayed.
As it ran on the front
Watch how fast 'modest' turns into a scandal depending on who's wearing it. Kathy Hochul puts on a head scarf to walk into an Islamic center — a courtesy, the kind of thing you do at a house of worship whether it's a yarmulke or a hijab — and conservative media treats it like she signed a treaty. Meanwhile CBS runs a headline about Abdul El-Sayed so loaded that lawmakers and journalists across the spectrum called it, on the record, 'insane' and 'blatantly racist,' and CBS's answer to that was to let the segment run and move on to weather.
Same week, two different institutions, same reflex: a Muslim American doing something ordinary — visiting a mosque, running for office, being covered by a network — gets treated as the provocation, and the actual provocateurs, the ones writing the headline or writing the outrage column, get to stay anonymous, institutional, unaccountable. Nobody at the paper running the criticism has to explain why a scarf is news. Nobody at CBS has to explain the copy desk meeting where that headline got approved.…
…(cont) This isn't a culture-war sideshow, it's a tell about who gets to be the default American and who has to keep proving it, one headline at a time. A governor wears a scarf into a house of worship and it becomes a national segment; a network runs language rights groups call racist about a candidate, and that's a Tuesday. Notice the direction the outrage always travels — toward the person practicing their religion or running their campaign, never toward the desk that decided the scarf was news or the desk that approved the headline.
The stakes aren't abstract. This is the coverage that decides who gets called a threat and who gets called a leader, and right now the editorial and political machinery making those calls isn't even being asked to explain itself — not the columnists who found a scarf alarming, not the headline writers who found a candidate's name worth that language. That's the con, plain and repeatable: the scrutiny lands on the person being visibly Muslim, and the institutions doing the scrutinizing never have to sit for the same interview.
“Same week, same country: a governor gets dragged for wearing a scarf out of respect, and a network runs a headline lawmakers call racist about a Muslim candidate, and only one of those gets treated like news. Watch who has to apologize and who doesn't.”
“Hochul's scarf comment is just an observation about optics ahead of an election, that's fair game, and the CBS headline, that's an editorial judgment call, headlines get workshopped, sometimes they land wrong, that doesn't mean — well, 'insane' and 'blatantly racist' were the actual words the people reacting used, so maybe it does mean something.”
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.