Stephen Colbert: Don’t Publicly Rip the Boss When You’re Losing the Company Money

As Jim Geraghty, Noah Rothman, Charlie Cooke, and Jeff Blehar have detailed at length, there were ample reasons for CBS to pull the plug on Stephen Colbert’s tenure as host of The Late Show, and to go a step further and kill the program. Those reasons were commercial (Colbert was losing the network some $40 million a year, his still-substantial audience was a fraction of what he used to draw, and its average age of 68 made it an undesirable market for advertisers), artistic (the shrill, one-note politics and parade of partisan guests), and driven in part by wider dynamics (the declining need for late-night-specific shows in a streaming age, the diminished star power of entertainment-world guests). My additional suspicion, wearing my lawyer hat, is that CBS preferred to kill the show rather than just replace the host in part to get out of union contracts (and maybe even for reasons related to Colbert’s contract). Left unanswered is the smaller question of what CBS will now do with the Ed Sullivan Theater.

As Noah details, none of this has stopped left-wingers from pushing the conspiracy theory that Colbert was fired to appease Donald Trump, because CBS needs federal regulatory approval for a merger and just settled a flimsy Trump lawsuit — a settlement Colbert publicly criticized. Never mind that CBS decided to leave Colbert on the air for another year to blast Trump and effectively campaign for Democrats with network airtime, which would make no sense if that was the motive. Never mind as well that Elizabeth Warren and other proponents of this theory happen to be the exact people who want the federal government to aggressively exercise the very regulatory powers at issue in order to shape corporate behavior they disfavor, especially in the media and social-media space — beware people who decry as fascism the exercise of powers they want for themselves.

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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As Jim Geraghty, Noah Rothman, Charlie Cooke, and Jeff Blehar have detailed at length, there were ample reasons for CBS to pull the plug on Stephen Colbert’s tenure as host of The Late Show, and to go a step further and kill the program. Those reasons were commercial (Colbert was losing the network some $40 million a year, his still-substantial audience was a fraction of what he used to draw, and its average age of 68 made it an undesirable market for advertisers), artistic (the shrill, one-note politics and parade of partisan guests), and driven in part by wider dynamics (the declining need for late-night-specific shows in a streaming age, the diminished star power of entertainment-world guests). My additional suspicion, wearing my lawyer hat, is that CBS preferred to kill the show rather than just replace the host in part to get out of union contracts (and maybe even for reasons related to Colbert’s contract). Left unanswered is the smaller question of what CBS will now do with the Ed Sullivan Theater.

As Noah details, none of this has stopped left-wingers from pushing the conspiracy theory that Colbert was fired to appease Donald Trump, because CBS needs federal regulatory approval for a merger and just settled a flimsy Trump lawsuit — a settlement Colbert publicly criticized. Never mind that CBS decided to leave Colbert on the air for another year to blast Trump and effectively campaign for Democrats with network airtime, which would make no sense if that was the motive. Never mind as well that Elizabeth Warren and other proponents of this theory happen to be the exact people who want the federal government to aggressively exercise the very regulatory powers at issue in order to shape corporate behavior they disfavor, especially in the media and social-media space — beware people who decry as fascism the exercise of powers they want for themselves.