Bari Weiss Threatens To Talk With Blue And Red America
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick …
“This is ‘60 Minutes’.”
Yes, but what if the top story was this: “As Christians Are Slaughtered, the World Looks Away.” This is the brief intro text for the story: “Islamists massacred over 200 people in Yelwata, Nigeria — many of them women and children. The media barely mentioned it.”
Actually, this story about the massacres in Nigeria that have been happening for decades — 7,000 Christians slaughtered so far in 2025 — came from The Free Press, the online sensation at the heart of the news firestorm we examined in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. This New York Times headline was typical: “How Bari Weiss Won — At The Free Press, she battled ‘wokeness’ and buddied up with billionaires. Now she’s the editor in chief of CBS News.”
Before we get back to Weiss and the terrified CBS news staff, let’s return to that first Nigeria story. Why? In the podcast, I mentioned this Free Press story and several others and asked what would happen if this topic was featured — for real — in a gripping feature at “60 Minutes,” then linked with regular hard-news updates on other CBS News programs. Here is that story’s long, but essential, overture:
It was a night of heavy rainfall in Yelwata, a town in central Nigeria. On Friday June 13, over 500 Christians—many of them women and children — gathered together in temporary shelters in the town’s Market Square. Most of them had fled their homes across the region, hoping to find greater protection in Yelwata from a spate of recent attacks in which Islamist terrorists have massacred Christians.
Earlier in the day, the town’s armed vigilantes and a few policemen had set off to investigate reports of terrorist activity nearby. But this turned out to be a diversion, according to Steven Kefas, a Nigerian journalist.
At around 10:30 p.m., he told me, a “killer squad” of Islamists descended on the town in a three-hour murderous rampage.
Father Ukuma Jonathan, the local parish priest, was in the presbytery with displaced Christians when they heard yells of “Allahu Akbar,” gunfire, and screams. Everyone immediately dropped to the floor, fearing for their lives, according to John Pontifex, head of press and public affairs at Aid to the Church in Need UK, who spoke to Father Jonathan the day after the attack.
The jihadists broke into homes and shelters, murdering people with machetes. They were “cutting them like they were cutting a cow or an animal to be eaten,” said Kefas, who visited Yelwata and interviewed around 30 survivors the week after the massacre. The terrorists then doused their victims’ bodies and homes in petrol and set them ablaze.
At the time that feature was published — last June — 218 people had died in that one attack, with many others severely injured and some in critical condition.
But that was just one attack, right? Perhaps blue-zip-code journalists are not sure if this is part of a trend that will last, one that could even influence something important in American politics?
Actually, The Free Press added the second part of a “60 Minutes” style investigation in September, focusing on the personal story of one ordinary Nigerian caught up in this bloody drama. That headline: “He’s Christian. In Nigeria, That Meant Torture and Prison.”
The crime? He helped two young women escape from Islamist militants, as well as their own families, after they converted to Christianity. This update story included additional background material on what has been happening:
Just before Easter, militants slaughtered 170 in the counties of Ukum and Logo.
Since 2009, Islamist extremists in northern Nigeria have destroyed more than 18,000 churches and killed over 50,000 Christians nationwide, according to a 2023 report by the Nigeria-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law. And another 5 million Christians have been displaced within the country. In 2025 so far, over 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed.
Some U.S. lawmakers have called the murder and persecution of Nigerian Christians “religious cleansing.” However, Nigeria has not yet received an official designation by the U.S. State Department as a “Country of Particular Concern” — a classification reserved for foreign governments that commit or permit “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”
The key word, in that last paragraph, is “some.” So far, the massacres in Nigerian have been jammed into the think file of news events and trends that do not deserve coverage because the activists most concerned about them are “conservatives,” “Christians” or both. Pope Leo XIV is the latest Vatican leader to speak out, but that’s the same old, same old.
Nigerian Christians, in other words, have the wrong American political allies. Although that may be changing.
Again, would it make a difference if this story received strong play on a show as legendary as “60 Minutes”? We could find out, if Weiss has the same approach to news at CBS that she welcomed at The Free Press.
The bottom line: Weiss (a liberal Jew who is married to another woman) has demonstrated a strong belief that real religious believers, acting on real religious beliefs, can shape real news events in the real world.
When The Free Press story broke, Weiss released the letter that she sent to the CBS newsroom. It is friendly and deceptively normal. However, the text is loaded with words that many elite journalists will consider landmines. Here is the full list of the journalism values that Weiss promised to defend (I have added bold italics):
Journalism that reports on the world as it actually is.
Journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.
Journalism that respects our audience enough to tell the truth plainly — wherever it leads.
Journalism that makes sense of a noisy, confusing world.
Journalism that explains things clearly, without pretension or jargon.
Journalism that holds both American political parties to equal scrutiny.
Journalism that embraces a wide spectrum of views and voices so that the audience can contend with the best arguments on all sides of a debate.
Journalism that rushes toward the most interesting and important stories, regardless of their unpopularity.
Journalism that uses all of the tools of the digital era.
Journalism that understands that the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with the facts, first and foremost.
For starters, Weiss made it clear that CBS will not avoid stories simply because they are “unpopular,” thus allowing the newsroom to cover the “world as it actually is.”
For example: Are the massacres in Nigeria real? Yes, but would they be welcomed by viewers in the half of America that provides the core of the CBS staff and remaining audience?
The letter’s emphasis on fairness, accuracy and truth may be threatening, in an era in which bishops in the cathedrals of elite news have drawn a bright blue line between voices and organizations that provide valid information and those that push “misinformation.” Are human-rights organizations in Nigeria trustworthy if they are linked to religious groups? What about the scientists who produced troubling research about the side-effects of COVID-19 vaxines on young men?
To ask a famous biblical question: “What is truth?”
Weiss pounded the viewpoint-diversity point home by stressing that CBS will seek “a wide spectrum of views and voices.” Check out the variety of people featured on “Honestly,” her podcast at The Free Press. I think Weiss is saying that readers, listeners and viewers (the digital-era reality) can prepare to hear hard questions debated.
Finally, note this stunning promise, that the CBS platform will strive to cover “both American political parties” with “equal scrutiny.” Really? Think about this: During the Joe Biden years, what percentage of major New York Times stories criticized Democrats? During Donald Trump 1.0 and 2.0, what percentage of up-front Times stories have criticized Republicans?
In the Times story about the rise of Weiss, readers were told:
The Free Press, similarly (to X and others), provided shelter to those who formerly leaned left but were newly drawn to right-wing causes — a phenomenon once described by Ms. Weiss as a “tremendous political realignment.” …
Her publication has criticized corporate diversity initiatives and pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Its popular podcast “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” chronicled the backlash over statements by the “Harry Potter” author about transgender women. Ms. Weiss has agreed that “cancel culture” is akin to “social murder.” …
“Conservatives know two things above all else,” Ms. Weiss continued, after warning of similar rising extremism on the right. “That evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.”
In other words, Weiss is an old-school liberal, not a “woke” progressive. She is a lesbian mom who believes that, for males and females, DNA is a scientific reality. She views legally enforced “gender-affirming care” is the new conversion therapy for gays and lesbians. She was saddened by the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Weiss has also been willing to listen to the stories of other old-school liberals who are making pilgrimages toward the cultural and moral right.
As an Orthodox Christian, I have noted the frequent appearances by the Orthodox convert Paul Kingsnorth — a former atheist and then green pagan — in the digital pages of The Free Press. It’s hard to imagine “60 Minutes” features linked to Kingsnorth with titles like “The Cross and the Machine,” “How the West Lost Its Soul” and “Rage Against the Machine: A Vision of AI Resistance.”
I will end with one more Free Press story that would be interesting, to say the least, slotted after the legendary tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick opening at “60 Minutes.” The headline: “Arrested Again — for Holding a Sign.”
… A 75-year-old grandmother named Rose Docherty was arrested in Scotland, for standing outside a hospital where abortions are performed while holding a sign that read: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”
If that sentence sounds familiar, it’s because this was the second time Docherty has been arrested, for exactly the same reason.
In February … Docherty was put in handcuffs and taken to a police station — because she had been silently holding the same sign outside the same hospital.
“I didn’t speak about abortion,” Docherty told The Free Press … through her legal counsel. “I simply offered anyone the chance to chat about anything.”
Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, the building she stood outside, is in what UK governments call a “safe access zone” — an area where exerting any “influence” over those seeking or providing abortions is banned, due to laws that have come into effect in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland in recent years.
The Scottish government now enforces these “abortion buffer zones” within 656 feet of medical establishments that offer pregnancy terminations. As The Free Press reported last October, people have been arrested or fined simply for silently praying outside such places.
Note: Silent prayer. This grandmother has been arrested, in the past, because the police said they knew that she was thinking the wrong thoughts on an important issue.
Ah, but are free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion — old-school liberal causes — now considered “right-wing” when defended by the wrong kinds of people? CBS News staffers may be asked to feature voices on both sides of that kind of debate.
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