“Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed (D) on Sunday ripped into CNN host Jake Tapper for asking him questions related to Iran and Israel — specifically about past comments the candidate has made.” Thus begins a July 19, 2026, “breaking news” article for The Hill, entitled “El-Sayed rips Jake Tapper over Israel, Iran questions on CNN,” by Ryan Mancini, the breaking news reporter at the publication.
Conlan Houston, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
A candidate’s television appearance is normally not breaking news, unless something happens that changes the outlook of the campaign, like announcing that he is withdrawing from the race. El-Sayed’s certainly was not. It was a campaign appearance with prepared talking points. Covering it in written format requires examining El-Sayed’s claims. Mancini instead cherry-picked El-Sayed’s highlights and transcribed them.
Mancini’s called El-Sayed a “physician.” This has been a source of controversy. El-Sayed went to medical school, but he never obtained a license to practice medicine, nor has he ever practiced medicine, and it is unlawful in Michigan “to induce the belief” that one has a license or is registered to practice medicine. Politico and Washington Free Beacon have reported that El-Sayed has falsely identified himself as a physician. (The Hill has not responded to CAMERA’s request to correct the record as of the publication of this article.) The article’s author, at best, was ignorant of the campaign he was covering or, worse, was taking a side in this argument—the wrong side, which is the likelier case given the positive coverage throughout the piece.
Mancini also failed to scrutinize any of El-Sayed’s arguments. The old rule in journalism, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” is no longer operational.
During the interview, El-Sayed stated that “the questions seem less to be about the interests of Michiganders than the fact of something happening 6,000 miles away,” which Mancini transcribed.
But elsewhere during the conversation, Tapper quoted El-Sayed opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state as inherently illiberal and that he could not support Israel on human rights grounds. Another example: audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from the day joint U.S.–Israeli strikes killed Iran’s longtime dictator Ali Khamenei, revealing El-Sayed telling his audience, “There are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today, I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all.”
That is, El-Sayed has himself repeatedly made it about “something happening 6,000 miles away,” something The Hill did not point out.
Mancini did mention a question from Tapper on this issue: “Why were you worried about offending people who support the ayatollah?” He followed it with El-Sayed’s response that America has “no business fighting” the Iran war, adding that the war has resulted in the deaths of American service-members. But Mancini omits what came after, how Tapper called out El-Sayed for dodging the question about offending Khamenei’s supporters in Michigan.
Egregiously, Mancini then unethically printed El-Sayed’s attack on his primary opponent without asking for a response from the Stevens campaign:
The Senate candidate has called out his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), for having ties to AIPAC. El-Sayed told Semafor that Stevens is “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account, that’s it.” He also told Zeteo last month that the tax dollars sent to Israel and “sent to orphan, or maim, or murder other people’s kids … does haunt my dreams.”
Mancini is not reporting breaking news. Nor is he investigating the story. He may be employed as a reporter, but with this El-Sayed hype piece, he is acting as El-Sayed’s media surrogate. His write-up of the interview makes his subject look better than he did on television. Alarmingly, the editors at The Hill failed to step in and preserve The Hill’s credibility.