CBS is Being Accused of Canceling Stephen Colbert to Appease Trump
If you're just catching up on the nuke that went off right in the middle of the Late Night TV landscape a few hours ago, you should look no further than Pat's predictably excellent instant reaction to the blast:
So to me, someone who moved to New York City in 2014 to work for David Letterman, this comes as a shock. Almost as shocking as CBS, a network that's worth $16 BILLION, claiming that the decision was "purely financial." And don't get me wrong, I get it - Colbert is a left leaning host in a nation that increasingly swings right, but even so this seems crazy. Why not just get a new host? Are you guys really losing that much money? Why tell Colbert on a Wednesday? Did he not see this coming? This whole thing just seems so strange and abrupt. The Tonight Show has made it work, why can't The Late Show? Colbert also LEADS IN THE RATINGS with 2.42 million nightly viewers compared to Kimmel's 1.7 and Fallon's 1.19.
It's that middle part, about Colbert leaning left while the country is veering more to the right, that seems to be the Ground Zero here. First because it's objectively true.
The Late Night format has existed basically unchanged since the early days of broadcast television. Once the networks determined there's an audience to be reached after 11pm, they looked for something that was easy to produce and therefore cheap. So they came up with a desk, a couch, the backdrop of a city skyline, and had celebrities come on to banter with the host. And for the first 65 years or so, the shows were all more or less apolitical. Yes, they told political jokes. That's been a staple of American comedy since Mark Twain or Will Rogers. But as Boomers in the 1970s went to bed after laughing at Nixon jokes, they did so having no idea who Johnny Carson voted for. The same was true about Letterman, Conan, Leno and anyone else who occupied that space. They aimed for the broadest possible audience. The cities on the coast and the Midwest. They were all doing their version of Michael Jordan's shoe marketing strategy. "Republicans buy penis medicine too."
All that changed the minute Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. Then all the shows with the exception of Conan, turned the wheel hard left. The monologues all began to take direct aim at Trump, fired every round, and then threw the empty gun at him. And Colbert outflanked them all. The comedy appealed to an increasingly self-selecting audience of Never Trumpers, while alienating the half of the country that went over to Fox News and the right-of-center Gutfeld! program, which became the most watched show in its time slot.
For sure, Colbert didn't do himself any favors with this kind of full body cringe-inducing material:
But what he did succeed in doing is locking down the biggest share of the political left, which he was clearly going for. Going so far as to rip his own bosses for settling a lawsuit with Trump:
Mediaite - Colbert ripped into Paramount on Monday as he returned to The Late Show after a vacation.
“As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company, but just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help. This settlement is for a nuisance lawsuit Trump filed claiming that 60 Minutes deceptively edited their interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris last fall,” he said. “Paramount knows they could have easily fought it because, in their own words, the lawsuit was completely without merit. And keep in mind, Paramount produced Transformers Rise of the Beasts. They know completely without merits." …
[T]he $16 million will be going to “Mr. Trump’s legal fees and costs and that the money,” as well as the president’s presidential library. …
He said:
"Unlike the payoffs from ABC and Twitter, Paramount’s settlement did not include an apology. Instead — that’s good —instead, the corporation released a statement where they said, ‘You may take our money, but you will never take our dignity. You may, however, purchase our dignity for the low, low price of $16 million. We need the cash.’ I believe… Now, I believe that this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s big fat bride. (sic) Because this all comes as Paramount’s owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance!"
It's not hard to connect those dots. A $16 billion network has to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with the Commander in Chief. An employee blasts them for it on their own airwaves. While they're in the middle of negotiations with another media company. And about 72 hours later, not only is said employee out of job, they're just going to mothball the entire operation. An IP that's been going strong for them for over 30 years.
Leading many on that same left to question whether Stephen Colbert was sacrificed on the altar in order to appease an angry god. Sometimes using some remarkably similar language to ask the question:
Though the feeling isn't unanimous on the left:
If you're at all a fan watching history unfold before our very eyes, then the next few months and years are going to be fascinating for a lot of reasons.
One, the revolution in media is happening faster than anyone could've possibly imagined. Cable is on its deathbed. The networks are following an old template for programming that hasn't got long to live. Practically no one under the age of about 70 is getting their news from the networks any more. They've spent 10 years now going all in on being the opposition to Trump, even when he wasn't in office. Now both ABC and CBS have had to pay a combined $30 million to build a presidential library in his honor. And look to all the world like they're bending the knee as much as possible. Firing the most popular (non-right wing) host in Late Night in what looks unmistakably like an attempt to curry favor with the guy who'll be in charge of the country for 3 1/2 more years.
No matter where you are politically, watching this play out in real time is wild. You couldn't have seen this coming as recently as a year ago. And there's no way to predict where it's all heading. But regardless, it's going to be interesting as all hell to see it happen.