Fox News and the New York Post ran 36 headlines tying Abdul El-Sayed to terror, Islamism or the Muslim Brotherhood. Not one of their 289 headlines called the attacks baseless.

Have you noticed how often Abdul El-Sayed's name now sits next to the words terror, Sharia and Muslim Brotherhood? He is the Democratic candidate for the US Senate in Michigan, and he could become the first Muslim ever elected to it.

So we examined every headline about him in NewsCord's archive: 920 headlines from 141 outlets, from November 2025 to 28 October 2026, with 740 full article texts stored.

What we found:

• Fox News ran 181 headlines about El-Sayed, more than any other outlet. The New York Post ran 108. The next was the New York Times, with 51.
• 68 headlines tied him to terror, Islamism or the Brotherhood. 36 of them came from Fox and the Post, two outlets that ran under a third of all his headlines.
• 24 headlines made that link in the outlet's own words, with no accuser to quote. 19 of them were Fox or the Post.
• 45 headlines called the attacks anti-Muslim or baseless, or led on his rebuttal. Not one came from Fox or the Post.
• Of 26 Fox articles that mention the Brotherhood, 2 said in Fox's own words that the claim had no evidence. The Post did it in none of its 17. Every other outlet together did it in 29 of 76.

Fox and the Post carried this smear for three months, and almost never told their readers it had nothing behind it. Donald Trump called El-Sayed a "Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%". PolitiFact rated Trump's claim Pants on Fire.

What the 20 busiest outlets put in El-Sayed's headlines

Fox News ran 181 headlines about El-Sayed, including 35 about faith, religion, terror or the Brotherhood. The New York Post ran 108, including 21 on those subjects. The chart accounts for every headline in the archive, with one bar per outlet and the full period counted together.

Who made the allegation in the headline?

An outlet can put the Brotherhood in a headline to repeat an allegation or to answer it. Among the 101 headlines naming the Brotherhood or other terror, Islamism, Sharia or 9/11 references, 23 made the link in the outlet's own wording. Another 38 attributed a claim without challenging it. Seventeen challenged the attack or led on a rebuttal; six put El-Sayed's reaction in the headline. The remaining 17 were other reporting or outside the earlier treatment coding.

Among these 101 headlines, Fox and the Post made the link in their own wording 18 times, and neither outlet ran a headline challenging the attack or leading on a rebuttal. CNN's two headlines in this subset both led on his answer or challenged the question. The Independent's two repeated an accuser's claim without challenging it. The Jerusalem Post ran three linking headlines and the Daily Mail five; neither ran a challenge or rebuttal headline in this subset.

The Muslim Brotherhood claim only took off in mid October. Fox and the Post had been tying El-Sayed and his family to terror and Islamism since August. Through August and September, 15 of the 19 headlines that did it came from those two outlets.

Some of the August and September headlines, in the outlets' own words:

• Fox News, 5 August: "El-Sayed campaign backed by over $100,000 from dozens of members of group with alleged terror ties"
• Fox News, 12 August: "Unearthed interview reveals El-Sayed's Sharia 'obligation': 'Not because of fear'"
• Fox News, 14 August: "El-Sayed's half sister offered Oct 7 'blessing,' one year after Hamas attack: 'Allahu Akbar'"
• New York Post, 19 August: "Abdul El-Sayed's mom worked for 'global terrorist' group accused of funding bin Laden, Hamas and Taliban: report"
• Fox News, 10 September: "Fatwas, holy wars and socialism: Inside the Islamic conference where El-Sayed drew a hero's welcome"

Not one of those headlines says El-Sayed did anything wrong. They are about his donors, his half-sister, his mother, a conference he spoke at and his own words about his faith. That is guilt by association, run as news.

When Trump called him a jihadist, Fox and the Post looked away

At a rally in Michigan on 25 October, Trump called El-Sayed a "jihadist", invoked 9/11 and said he should have to go through a metal detector to enter the Senate. Over the next three days 34 outlets ran 38 headlines on it. NPR's read "Trump escalates anti-Muslim attacks against El-Sayed in Michigan". CBS News wrote "Trump attacks El-Sayed over his faith during Michigan rally, calls him a "jihadist"".

Fox News, which had run 181 headlines about El-Sayed, gave it one line in a news roundup: "Trump escalates attacks on El-Sayed as Michigan Senate race tightens and more top headlines". The New York Post ran no headline on it. Over the same two days it ran five headlines about an advert backing El-Sayed that blamed Israel for grocery prices.

Two papers that had spent three months tying a Muslim candidate to terror had nothing to say when the president did it from a stage.

What the articles told their readers

We read every stored article that names the Muslim Brotherhood, 119 in all, and asked one question: does the outlet tell its readers the claim has no evidence? El-Sayed's own denial does not count. A reader is entitled to more than the accused man's word.

Common Dreams told readers the claim had no evidence in all three of its stored articles naming the Brotherhood. CNN and the Guardian did so in three of five each. The Independent did so in one of two, MSNBC in one of three and the Daily Mail in one of five. The New York Times did so in neither of its two; the Jerusalem Post in none of its eight. These are the articles NewsCord holds, and some outlets have only two or three in this comparison.

Fox had the answer in its own copy, twice. Here is its report on the final Senate debate, on 21 October:

Readers were told he erupted before they were told the accusation had nothing behind it. Here is what Fox called erupting:

Three days earlier Fox ran 702 words on El-Sayed comparing the questions to the ones John F. Kennedy faced over his Catholic faith. It told readers about his father-in-law's links to two Muslim organisations, a $200,000 donation to a super PAC, the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case and the US Treasury's designation of two Brotherhood branches. Then, in paragraph 20 of 22, after 617 words:

The Post's opinion pages called his denial a lie

The Post's news pages never said the claim had no evidence. Its opinion pages went the other way. On 14 October its columnist Josh Hammer wrote "El-Sayed is lying", and then:

Telling readers that a Muslim's denial is a religiously licensed lie is an old anti-Muslim trope. It means nothing he says can ever count. The Post printed it five days before PolitiFact rated Rogers's claim false, and thirteen days before it rated Trump's Pants on Fire.

On 20 October the Post's opinion pages ran Isaac Schorr: "His denial was a lie." On 23 October they ran Rich Lowry, who called the questions about his family's ties to extremist groups "well-founded". The same week, the Post's Editorial Board wrote that El-Sayed "(falsely)" accused Israel of genocide. The Post found the word falsely for the genocide in Gaza, and never once for the Brotherhood claim.

What Trump's accusation rested on

On 15 October Fox ran Trump's words in its headline: "Trump links Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to Muslim Brotherhood: 'He's a con man'".

The only material behind the accusation, in Fox's own report, is two 2012 posts by El-Sayed's half-sister about their mother's activism in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984.

What the 305-word report gave each side:

• 199 words introduced or repeated Trump's accusation and the posts about his mother.
• 95 words carried El-Sayed's denial.
• 11 words said Fox had asked his campaign for comment.
• 0 words told readers that posts about his mother's student politics cannot make him a member of anything.

The next day Fox complained that other outlets had not run the story. Its headline said the controversy was "ignored, downplayed by liberal media". In paragraph 6 of that same report, Fox quoted the reason they were careful:

Headlines about his temper

When the facts did not carry the story, the headlines turned to his reaction. On NBC Nightly News, Tom Llamas read out his half-sister's posts and asked him to explain them. This is his answer, as Fox printed it:

A man asked to answer for his mother's student politics, more than ten years before he was born, asked whether the question was serious. Fox called it agitated. The Post called it lashing out.

Fox turned a correction into a complaint about the press

At a town hall on 17 October a man shouted from the crowd, asking whether El-Sayed would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. The Guardian recorded his answer: "Sure, yeah, absolutely." CNN's transcript records it too. The Guardian later reported that the man was a former aide to the Republican senator Josh Hawley.

The next morning Mike Rogers, his Republican opponent, told CNN's Dana Bash that El-Sayed had not disavowed the group. Bash corrected him. PolitiFact rated Rogers's claim False.

Dana Bash corrected a false claim on air. Fox reported it as the press protecting El-Sayed, and never told its readers that Rogers was wrong.

The New York Post cut the letter

In November 2012, 46 Egyptian Americans and community groups signed a public statement backing decisions taken by Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's elected president. Al-Ahram published it on 25 November 2012. Signatory 33 is "Dr Abdul Rahman El-Sayed, New York".

On 21 October the New York Post called it "an open letter to the terror group". The next day it quoted the statement. It printed the sentence before the key line and the sentence after it, and left out the line in the middle:

The call to purge the media and the police is in the statement, and readers can judge it. The statement is still a letter of support for an elected president, with a limit on his powers written into it. It says nothing about joining the Brotherhood, and the US designation of the group's Egyptian branch that Fox cites came in January 2026, fourteen years later.

When NewsCord indexed that Post report, its headline said El-Sayed signed a "letter urging Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to 'purge media and police'". The headline on the page now says the letter urged "Egypt's late Muslim Brotherhood prez".

What the fact-checkers found

• Bridge Michigan checked the claim that El-Sayed pledged support to the Brotherhood and found no evidence for it.
• PolitiFact rated Rogers's claim that El-Sayed had not disavowed the group False, on 19 October.
• PolitiFact rated Trump's claim that El-Sayed is a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member Pants on Fire, on 27 October.
• The Washington Post corrected a headline that said Rogers had evidence of a pledge. Its report says he produced none.

None of the 43 Fox and Post articles that name the Brotherhood cites any of these fact-checks.

October close reading: how much space each outlet gave the group

For October we also read 86 reports from seven outlets on their live pages and counted the words in every paragraph that names the Brotherhood, including paragraphs that rebut it. A high share can mean an outlet spent its words answering the accusation, which is why the headline matters more than the word count.

CNN's first town-hall report put 52.8% of its words in paragraphs naming the group, and its headline read "Abdul El-Sayed disavows Muslim Brotherhood and criticizes implications that he has 'dual loyalty'". CNN used its space to report his answer. Fox used its headlines to keep the question open.

The Guardian is not clean either. Its report on the man who heckled him put the sentence "There is no evidence El-Sayed was personally involved" in paragraph 9, after 320 words.

Fox News and the New York Post spent three months tying a Muslim candidate to terror. Their own reporters, twice, and the fact-checkers, every time, said there was nothing behind it.