Detroit Metro Times Drops Mike Rogers Comment Requests, Citing 'Lies and Bigoted Attacks' on El-Sayed

On Wednesday, Steve Neavling, an investigative reporter at the Detroit Metro Times, posted a notice on X that the alt-weekly had never issued before. For the first time in its history, he wrote, the paper would stop seeking comment from a candidate's campaign because of repeated lies and bigoted attacks. The candidate was Mike Rogers, the Republican running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, whose campaign, Neavling said, keeps targeting the Muslim faith of his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed.

Neavling pointed to two claims in particular. The first was Rogers' assertion that El-Sayed has not disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood. According to Neavling, that is false: earlier in the week, when an audience member at a town hall asked El-Sayed to denounce the organization, he answered, "Sure, yeah, absolutely." The second was Rogers' suggestion that El-Sayed believes "America deserved 9/11." Neavling noted that the statement came from Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer who is a prominent El-Sayed supporter, and not from El-Sayed himself.

The paper also accused Rogers of inflating his counterterrorism résumé, specifically his role in the operation targeting Osama bin Laden. Neavling wrote that when the Metro Times raised these claims for an Oct. 8 report, Rogers' campaign declined to answer specific questions. It defended his record instead, and repeated an unfounded allegation that El-Sayed received money from terrorist organizations.

Neavling's accompanying article set out to count the ways Rogers had misrepresented El-Sayed across a range of topics. Rogers has attacked El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, over public safety, women's health and Michigan's auto industry. Neavling wrote that Rogers' own record includes opposing additional police funding, backing proposed cuts to women's health services, and voting against measures meant to steer work to U.S. manufacturers.

The article did not treat El-Sayed's side as spotless. During the July Democratic primary, he was questioned about calling himself a "physician" when, although he holds a medical degree, he is not licensed to practice medicine.

On autos, Neavling wrote that the Rogers campaign has claimed El-Sayed wants to ban gas-powered vehicles. Bridge Michigan found that El-Sayed had supported the clean energy goals of the Green New Deal but had not directly advocated such a ban. At the July primary debate, he opposed an electric vehicle mandate and said Michigan should keep producing internal combustion engines while building out EV infrastructure. Neavling added that Rogers himself once framed the move away from gasoline as an opportunity for Michigan workers. In an August 2008 message to constituents, Rogers praised the Chevrolet Volt and described a future of "clean, green cars" running hundreds of miles without gasoline.

Fox News Digital reported that neither the Rogers campaign nor the Metro Times responded to its requests for comment. The story also sits beside a separate controversy for El-Sayed. He has denied that he or his family have any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, but that denial came under scrutiny last week after social media posts surfaced in which his half-sister alleged that family members, including their mother, had been involved with the Islamist group.

What to watch is whether the Rogers campaign answers the Metro Times' charges, and whether the half-sister's claims draw a fuller response from El-Sayed as the Senate race heads into its final weeks.