U.S. Senate candidate for Michigan Abdul El-Sayed meets voters at Michigan Technological University. October 22, 2025. Photo by Conlan Houston via Wikimedia Commons.
Abdul El-Sayed wasn't even born when his mother allegedly participated in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. He wasn't raised by her, either. Yet more than 50 years later, journalists are asking the Michigan Senate candidate to explain her alleged activities, citing a 14-year-old tweet from his half-sister.
Ahead of the 2026 midterms, news coverage of Muslim candidates and elected officials is reinforcing a long-documented pattern of Islamophobic reporting, casting suspicion on politicians because of their faith.
“Superficial coverage contributes to the otherization of Muslim Americans, and it makes many people feel they will never be seen as fully part of this country,” said journalist and Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) board member Aida Alami in a written comment.
Under the purview of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, El-Sayed is facing concentrated coverage on his mother’s purported links to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has historically advocated for political systems intertwined with Islamic law.
“You don’t see any other group that is portrayed as having collective guilt or collective criminality like the Muslim community has,” Amy V. Doukoure, lead staff attorney for the Michigan chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told BridgeDetroit.
Coverage of Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar has also highlighted the intersectionality of othering immigrant Muslims. When Representative Ilhan Omar corrected a paperwork discrepancy in 2019, a Minnesota Star Tribune headline characterized it as “new documents revisit questions about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s marriage history.”
Omar has faced threats around deportation and racist slurs across her time in office, yet a federal raid of her house for immigration documentation and subpoenas of her relatives has been covered sparingly in national news outlets — many of which responded with outrage when the president ordered a dubious raid on his former national security advisor John Bolton in August 2025.
In 2024, CAIR reported the highest number of Muslim discrimination complaints since its first civil rights report in 1996, finding that “Muslims — along with Palestinians, Arabs, Jews, African Americans, Asian Americans and others — were targeted due to their anti-genocide and anti-apartheid viewpoints.”
Continuing a standard of coverage that ignores the history of Islamophobia and its intersections with racism and xenophobia carries real safety risks for Muslim community members, including candidates for elected office.
There are an array of resources to improve coverage:
Tasmiha Khan cooperated with the Reynolds Journalism Institute to publish the Muslim Media Toolkit, based on the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s “Covering American Muslims”
CAIR publishes research and civil rights reports, along with guides to Islamic religious practices
AMEJA has published a guide for covering Islamophobia in politics
But ultimately, Alami, also a contributing writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, says that “achieving textured coverage of Muslim Americans should not be complicated.”
“It means showing up all year round, building real sources in these communities, and holding these candidates to the same standard as everyone else, which is the least good journalism should be doing.”
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.
This piece was edited by Marlee Baldridge and copy edited by Gabe Schneider.