How Spielberg, Byrne, Springsteen, and Obama worshippers bowed to woke media
Like parents celebrating their child’s graduation from kindergarten, the CBS network proudly promoted the last episodes of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week before it finally went off the air May 21, after losing $40 million a year while still promoted as the flagship program for anti-Trump propaganda. Ads for the final episodes headlined three performers — Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen — whose prominence signified the network’s charade that it led millennial culture.
The fact is, CBS was deluding itself and its viewers by pretending that Spielberg, Byrne, and Springsteen represent the nation’s zeitgeist. Would the trio of pop culture guest stars and political fellow travelers magically raise the ratings for a show that notoriously lacked millennial appeal? (Ratings analysts stated that late-night TV only attracts a small demographic, a viewership of primarily 68-year-old Boomers.)
Ads for the episode caught my attention — and broke my heart — because long ago these artists offered high points of humanist creativity (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Fear of Music, Darkness on the Edge of Town) but recently have become political stooges, signaling their undeniable artistic decline.
Spielberg, Byrne, and Springsteen were never admired for their politics but respected for works of art that complicated the American experience beyond the political sphere. In recent years, their renown has shifted from personal expression toward dull, unoriginal media currency — assuming the attitudinizing postures most likely to win approval and boost their profits. The fact of Spielberg, Byrne, and Springsteen jumping on the Colbert bandwagon reveals horrible desperation. None of these men can boast of a recent work of popular art that compelled the world; instead, each one has exhibited a creeping, shallow partisanship.
The insignificance of Spielberg’s West Side Story, Byrne’s American Utopia, and Springsteen’s Western Stars suggests a pandering to wokeness; works that failed to win popularity and that finally reduced these artists to the bottom-feeder level of Colbert’s fourth-rate-comic pandering. They’ve all become products of the dishonesty and condescension that defines CBS, above all other TV networks, as opportunistic media operating via narrow, unexamined authority.
It’s unthinkable that artists as richly imaginative and sensitive as Spielberg, Byrne, and Springsteen once were could ever align themselves with Colbert’s petty, unfunny, obtuse politics. What’s more likely is a desperate effort to connect with a worn-out idea of social power. Suffering from wokeness and Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), these artists hold on to the ineffectiveness of contemporary liberalism, in all its confusion and futility. (See Lincoln, American Utopia, and Wrecking Ball as evidence of dissatisfaction, poverty, and inequality that linger, plus the makers’ own guilt-ridden privilege.)
At CBS, each of these socially conscious artists beclowns himself, participating in political showbiz rituals that are less relevant than social media podcasts; these analog-era codgers seem drained of individual integrity. None of them recall from their Seventies heyday the great punk-rock era critique of media as being “in the hands of such a lot of fools / trying to anesthetize the way that you feel.” Colbert himself merely stands in for the moral upheaval personified by Barack Obama’s connection with such mainstream media cabals as CBS. During Obama’s regime, the president of CBS News (from 2011 to 2019) was David Rhodes, the brother of Ben Rhodes, who was Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, thus establishing the CBS–Democratic Party alliance.
Obama himself, a frequent guest on Colbert’s program, might be added as a fourth horseman to the Spielberg-Byrne-Springsteen corral. But Colbert has to be the foremost network-killing figure. His freakish attempts at topical humor merely normalized TDS bias — he bore a naked hostility that should have distressed Spielberg, Byrne, and Springsteen as much as it repulsed many late-night viewers.
But CBS relies upon a superficial connection to explain the network’s class-based, partisan allegiance. CBS broadcasts in the traditions of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather (erroneously referred to as “trustworthy”) that were only superficially objective — a stance that Colbert obliterated. It is only the network’s mythology that, like Saturday Night Live, suckers its in-studio audience of tourists and slate of celebrities caught in the cycle of peddling new products while kowtowing to New York City’s one-party domination. Since the Colbert apocalypse, the Columbia Broadcasting System acronym has inspired less respectful barbs — from Constant Bull S*** to Commie Broadcast Silliness — to describe a failed attempt at reducing a media brand to an anti-American institution.