Left-leaning outlets are silent on El-Sayed's Piker phone call
Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee in Michigan's open Senate race, and three things happened this week: he accused Benjamin Netanyahu of pushing the U.S. into war with Iran, he reportedly called Twitch streamer Hasan Piker to warn that Piker's Israel rhetoric was costing him votes, and left-leaning outlets covered none of it. The story of a Democratic candidate privately distancing himself from a prominent pro-Palestinian voice while publicly blaming Netanyahu is a tension worth reporting. Nobody on the left is reporting it.
Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan campaign faces scrutiny over rhetoric and ego concerns
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What happened
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan's U.S. Senate race, made two notable moves this week. He publicly accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of pushing the Trump administration to enter the war with Iran, a statement reported by The Hill. He also reportedly placed a private phone call to Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing Twitch streamer with a large Arab-American following, warning Piker that his rhetoric on Israel was costing El-Sayed votes in Michigan. Fox News reported the Piker call; the NY Post ran an opinion piece characterizing El-Sayed's campaign as driven by "immense self-regard." Michigan's Arab-American community is a well-documented electoral factor in statewide races. Three outlets have this story, and none of them are left-leaning.
Fox News and the Post cover the Piker call; The Hill covers the Netanyahu claim
Fox News reported the substance of El-Sayed's private warning to Piker: that the streamer's Israel commentary was damaging El-Sayed's vote share. The Hill reported El-Sayed's public accusation that Netanyahu "pushed" the Trump administration into the Iran war. The NY Post ran an opinion column focused on El-Sayed's ego rather than either specific event. The result is that the public statement and the private call are being covered by entirely different outlets, with no single piece connecting them into the obvious story: a candidate saying one thing publicly about Israel and something quite different privately.
What one side told you that the other didn't
Left-leaning outlets have published nothing on El-Sayed this week.
The candidate is the Democratic nominee in a competitive Senate race in a state where Arab-American voters swung measurably in 2024. A reported private call in which he distances himself from a prominent pro-Palestinian commentator is exactly the kind of internal Democratic tension that left-leaning outlets cover aggressively when the subject is, say, a moderate distancing from a progressive. The absence here is total. Readers of left-leaning outlets this week have no way to know the Piker call was reported.
The public statement and the private call have never appeared in the same article.
El-Sayed told the public that Netanyahu is responsible for the Iran war. He reportedly told Piker privately that Piker's Israel rhetoric is hurting his campaign. Those two positions are not obviously compatible, and the tension between them is the story. Fox News reported the call. The Hill reported the Netanyahu statement. Neither outlet reported both. The reader who reads only one of them gets half a picture that looks coherent. The reader who reads both gets a question nobody has yet asked on the record.
What to watch
If Hasan Piker responds publicly to the reported phone call — on stream or on social media — left-leaning outlets will face pressure to cover a story they have so far ignored. Watch for whether their first entry into El-Sayed coverage frames the Piker call as a conflict or buries it inside a broader campaign profile. The framing of that first piece will tell you how the outlet intends to handle El-Sayed for the rest of the race.
This kind of gap — where one side reports a fact and the other doesn’t mention it — shows up in about 40% of major stories.