By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
There’s a lot of schadenfreude on the right, and even
more lamentation on the left, about the cancellation of The Late Show With
Stephen Colbert.
Donald Trump leads the schadenfreude caucus. “I
absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his
ratings,” Trump crowed on social media. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even
less talent than Colbert!” (It is remarkable that a president who campaigned
with a vow to end “cancel culture” is so uninhibited in his celebration of
cancel culture when it’s on his terms.)
The lamentations from the left are just as exuberant,
from the other direction. They hail Colbert as a heroic martyr for free expression
and speaking truth
to power. “Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free
society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country’s leader on TV
without repercussions,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes declared.
In a sense, both sides essentially agree that Colbert was
canceled because of his politics. The argument from the left is that this was
unfair and even illegitimate. The illegitimate claim rests on the fact that
CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has been trying to curry favor with the
administration to gain approval for the sale of the network to Skydance Media.
Shari Redstone, Paramount’s owner, approved a settlement of Trump’s dubious
lawsuit against 60 Minutes (which Colbert had criticized days earlier as
a “big fat bribe”).
Colbert’s scalp was a sweetener, critics claim.
I think that theory is plausible, given the timing
of the decision and the way it was announced. If this was the plan all along,
why not announce the decision at
the 2025 upfronts and sell ads in tandem with the wind-down? That’s the way
this sort of thing has been done in the past.
But Colbert’s critics on the right have an equally
plausible point. Colbert made the show very political and partisan, indulging
his Trump “resistance” schtick to the point where he basically cut the
potential national audience in half. He leaned heavily on conventionally
liberal politicians
(tellingly, on the night he announced the news of his cancellation, his first
guest was California Sen. Adam Schiff—a man who couldn’t get a laugh if you hit
him in the face with a pie).
But both the left-wing and right-wing interpretations
have some holes. The theory that this was purely a political move overlooks the
fact that CBS didn’t merely fire Colbert, it’s terminating the iconic Late
Show entirely and giving the airtime back to local affiliates. If the
bosses solely wanted to curry favor with Trump, they could have given the show
to more Trump-friendly (funnier and popular with the young’ns) comedians such
as Shane Gillis or Andrew Schulz. The show was reportedly
losing some $40 million a year. Even if they hired someone for a quarter of
Colbert’s $15
million salary, it would still be losing money.
On the right, many—Trump
included—have pointed to the fact that Greg
Gutfeld’s not-quite-late-night Fox show has better ratings than his
competitors on the three legacy networks. That’s true, but it’s hardly as if
Gutfeld is any less partisan than Colbert, Kimmel, or Jimmy Fallon.
It’s also true that the titans of previous eras—Steve
Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien—tended to avoid
strident partisanship. But the nostalgia-fueled idea that a more mainstream,
apolitical host would garner similar audiences again gets the causality
backward.
Those hosts were products of a different era, when huge
numbers of Americans from across the political spectrum consumed the same
cultural products. The hosts, much like news networks and newspapers, had a
powerful business incentive to play it down the middle and avoid alienating
large swaths of their audiences and advertisers. That era is over, forever.
Now media platforms look to garner small “sticky”
audiences they can monetize by giving them exactly what they want. There’s an
audience for Colbert, and for Gutfeld, but what makes the roughly 2 million to
3 million nightly viewers who love that stuff tune in makes the other 330
million potential viewers tune in to something else. The Late Show model—and
budget—simply doesn’t work with those numbers.
Cable news, led by Fox News, ushered in political
polarization in news consumption, but cable itself fueled the balkanization of
popular culture. Streaming and podcast platforms, led by YouTube, are
turbocharging that trend to the point where media consumption is now a la carte
(artificial intelligence may soon make it nigh upon bespoke).
The late-night model was built around a culture in which
there was little else to watch. That culture is never coming back.
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