Stephen Colbert is at the center of a conspiracy theory.
It was born last week, when news broke of CBS canceling Colbert’s late-night talk show.
The network’s move wasn’t hard to understand:
“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” reportedly loses $40 million a year, and Colbert is already in the final year of his contract.
Viewership for all the late-night gabfests is evaporating; there’s no recovery in sight.
Colbert is number one in his timeslot, but his show costs $100 million a year to produce and doesn’t bring in nearly enough eyeballs to attract the ad revenue to cover that.
So in what universe does CBS renew Colbert and keep losing tens of millions of dollars?
The conspiracy theory instantly popular among Democrats and many in the media who ought to know better, however, says Colbert is really being taken off air to please Donald Trump.
If the Federal Communications Commission allows it, Paramount Global, owner of CBS, will soon merge with Skydance, a company owned by David Ellison, whose father is a major Trump supporter.
The president doesn’t like being lampooned by Colbert; he’s happy to see his show end.
Trump benefits, so Trump must be to blame — right?
For those who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, there are no coincidences.
The truth is as clear as if Trump had been caught with his arms around the president of CBS Studios at a Coldplay concert.
You see, if not for Trump’s FCC leverage over the network, CBS would have been content to keep losing millions on Colbert for years to come.
That’s the crackpot view, and it’s politically convenient for Democrats, who’ve done their utmost to promote it.
Sen. Adam Schiff was a guest on the show the night Colbert announced its cancellation, and along with fellow Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, he took to X that evening to plant the seeds of conspiracy.
“If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better,” Schiff wrote, feeling no need to offer evidence for the insinuation.
“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,” Warren posted, referring to CBS’s settlement of a lawsuit over “60 Minutes.”
“Do I think this is a coincidence? NO,” Sanders chimed in.
The party instantly had its line, with shouty caps to drive it home.
It worked — Bluesky and Facebook lit up with liberals saying free speech was under attack by Trump, while CNN’s Brian Stelter, even as he reported the dismal financial reality of the “unfortunately unprofitable” show, packed his story with the conspiracy narrative.
Stelter devoted more than a third of his report titled “Inside CBS’ ‘agonizing decision’ to cancel Colbert’s top-rated late-night show” to speculation about how the pending sale to Skydance might have influenced CBS, with heavy emphasis on the Trump angle, which he brought elsewhere in his story, too.
Stelter even added his own spin, attempting to patch up one of the conspiracy tale’s obvious holes by suggesting CBS could have kept Colbert on air by cutting costs since Colbert had produced a much cheaper show, “After Midnight With Taylor Tomlinson,” that CBS was willing to renew.
But that’s absurd — “After Midnight” is already canceled; CBS canned it when Tomlinson announced her departure to return to stand-up comedy, and while she might well love the live stage, it’s obvious that running a late-night show on the cheap means paying hosts less: too little to keep Tomlinson.
How little would Colbert, currently raking in a reported $15-$20 million a year, settle for?
Colbert loses viewers and advertisers even with a $100 million budget — how poorly would a Colbert show more than 40% cheaper do?
Hollywood Reporter notes the average age of Colbert’s viewers is 68.
According to CNBC, the average age of David Letterman’s viewers when he handed his timeslot to Colbert in 2015 was 60.
All the data points in the same direction:
“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was a long time dying.
That’s true of late-night talk as a whole, too.
“I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” Trump predicted on Truth Social.
The president doesn’t have to pressure ABC to make that happen; the market will do that on its own, as it did with Colbert.
Colbert had a hit when he played a parody conservative on Comedy Central.
Once he stopped playing and presented his true face and politics to the country, he crashed.
Donald Trump didn’t get Stephen Colbert canceled; everything Democrats like about him did.
And the late-night host’s fate will also be theirs if they don’t heed this market lesson.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.
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