The Colbert ‘Conspiracy’

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 21, 2025

 

When the eponymous host of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert announced last week that CBS intends to cancel the program at the end of the current season, it seemed like a logical coda for a property that had long been in decline.

 

As Jim Geraghty detailed, the show hemorrhaged money for Colbert’s employer. The host himself commands an annual eight-figure salary, and sources close to the program claim that cost contributed to the program’s $40 million per year operating deficit. The advertising revenue the Late Show took in didn’t cover its $100 million production budget, including the salaries of the 200 or so employees who worked on it and the overhead associated with the show’s dedicated theater on the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway. The average Late Show viewer was 60 years old when Colbert took over — a trend the hip young Comedy Central phenom was supposed to reverse. Today, the average viewer is 68. The network didn’t even think the show was worth salvaging with another host. Instead, it cut bait entirely, consigning the legacy brand David Letterman began building back in 1993 to the annals of television history.

 

It only took Jim a few hours to assemble this evidence in support of the uncontroversial notion that Colbert’s cancellation was a sound business decision. He didn’t even touch on the many preceding indications that the late-night TV industry as a whole has suffered. The “format is stagnating,” the Agence France-Presse’s Thomas Urbain reported in October of last year. “Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ on CBS, has seen its audience slashed by 32 percent over the last five years.” Ad revenue has collapsed commensurately across the late-night spectrum. “Profits the shows provide have shrunk toward non-existent,” said industry expert Bill Carter.

 

Competition for eyeballs and ears in the atomized entertainment environment — to say nothing of the competition for laughs, which the late-night genera has generally abdicated — have put insurmountable pressure on the business. Even as viewers made a break for the exits, the business did not seem inclined to give the audience what it wanted. A few months prior to Urbain’s exposé, Politico reported on the $26 million Stephen Colbert helped raise for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign at a “sold-out spectacle” at Radio City Music Hall, which its reporters described as “rife with comedic opportunity.” Not that anyone exploited that opportunity. Still, the moment was “emblematic of a new era in late night comedy.” It revealed how the new late night is “more proudly partisan. More one-sided. More cautious in its targets. And it’s generally soft on Biden.”

 

All this paints a portrait of an entertainment genre gleefully purging its audience and rebooting its brand. Sometimes, that works — usually, when the effort is aimed at capturing a larger segment of the population. But the late night shows did the opposite. They discouraged the majority of Americans who turn into comedy shows for comedy, not extended political lectures. And they took aim at what election returns suggest is a shrinking demographic of hardcore left-wing activists. None of this makes business sense, so it isn’t surprising that the C-suite executives who do still possess the instinct toward commercial self-preservation pulled the rip cord.

 

If, however, you cannot admit to yourself that catering exclusively to left-liberals is a pathway toward irrelevance — that your and your allies’ failures are never your own but the result of a diabolical plot — you would probably dismiss all the above in favor of a conspiracy theory. Far too many succumbed to that temptation.

 

“CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump — a deal that looks like bribery,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) announced within minutes of the cancellation’s reveal. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”

 

Many of Warren’s fellow progressives defaulted to the notion that Trump had played some role in this turn of events — a conclusion buttressed only somewhat by Paramount’s rather craven cave to an unseemly (albeit not prosecutable) effort by Trump and his allies to punish CBS for its interview with Kamala Harris. “If you refuse to see what is happening, the cancellation of the Colbert show should open your eyes,” Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) hyperventilated. This is “what a censorship state looks like.” Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) concurred. “Do I think this is a coincidence?” he asked of the settlement’s timing and Colbert’s departure. “NO.” As the lead guest on the night Colbert revealed his forthcoming departure, Senator Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) probably felt especially culpable. Indeed, he should. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to endorse the notion that Congress should take up the issue. “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know,” he wrote. “And deserves better.”

 

The progressive commentariat jumped to similar conclusions. “‘Financial reasons’ my a**,” the essayist Charlotte Clymer wrote, citing Colbert’s 2.4 million audience. “This is political.” The Atlantic’s David Graham appeared to concur. “Since the election, CBS has seemed eager to please Trump however it can,” he wrote. That, and Trump’s willingness to apply pressure to private institutions that offend him, does seem to be the sum of the evidence in favor of the conclusion that “CBS no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt” over Colbert’s cancellation. “Let’s be honest: you cancel the top rated iconic late night show because the host is too critical of this president in this polarized environment,” commentor and former congressional candidate John Avlon speculated.

 

Even the journalists and field experts who conceded the green eyeshades’ case for Colbert’s ouster could not bring themselves to dismiss the conspiracy theory. “The timing and optics are terrible,” Puck’s Matthew Belloni said before letting his readers down gently with the news that “CBS execs had been mulling for a long time whether to pull the plug.” Even Bill Carter, who has been sounding the alarm about the “financial side of the business” for years, adopted an accusatory posture. “If CBS believes it can escape without some serious questions about capitulating to Trump,” he wrote, “they are seriously deluded.”

 

The questions will be asked, but it’s unlikely that those who do the asking will be satisfied with the answers they get. There is, as of this writing, almost no evidence in favor of the notion that the Trump White House played a role in this program’s failure. By contrast, there’s plenty to suggest that this late-night show — in fact, most late-night shows — have become legacy millstones around the necks of their networks. But no evidence was needed before Democrats and progressives internalized the conclusion that some force is at work covertly engineering their misery. There must be psychological comfort in that, even if it looks to the rest of us like the very ideological myopia that made Colbert’s product into something most Americans weren’t willing to buy.