The shocking announcement this week that the CBS parent company Paramount is cancelling the highest-rated network late-night talk show, “Late Night with Stephen Colbert,” has set off a firestorm of angry reaction, including suspicions that Paramount was cravenly caving in to political pressure from President Trump.
After all, Paramount just opted to donate $16 million to Trump’s library to settle a lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount probably would have won that lawsuit if it stuck to its guns—courts are loathe to dictate the editing process of a free press—but the suspicion is that Paramount would rather have a cozy relationship with Trump than stand up for a free press. Paramount is seeking approval of a large media merger and doesn’t want enmity with the overlords to mess up a business strategy.
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Stephen Colbert in 2019. From Wikimedia Commons, image by Montclair Film. |
The company says it was a purely financial decision, which I’m not buying because I don’t think any media decision is “purely financial.” But the company has a point about finances—the economics of network talk shows have been shifting dramatically in recent years, part of the many shifts in media that for more than a decade have been rocking our information infrastructure.
Ad revenue for network TV talks shows has plunged. While Colbert had the largest audience among such programs, it is the biggest slice of a pie that has shriveled to tart-size in recent years—the New York Times reported recently that Colbert’s TV audience is around 2.4 million viewers, not exactly an avalanche in a country of more than 340 million souls and 219 million TV sets.
The Times further reports that in June, for the first time in media history, online streaming replaced cable and broadcast TV as the leading distribution method for video entertainment. I am part of that trend. A fan of Colbert’s, I catch him most often in YouTube clips, since I months ago stopped watching “live” TV.
The signs of change have been around for a while. In March, Taylor Tomlinson announced she was leaving “After Midnight,” the show that came after Colbert’s, and CBS cancelled that show. (Colbert was executive producer of that show).
Still, while there are powerful economic forces working against late-night talk shows, the timing of the Paramount announcement, the same week that Colbert famously blasted the company for what he called “a big fat bribe” to Trump, certainly does not look good.
And it occurs in a backdrop of a Republican administration and Republican Party willing to use “liberal media” as a punching bag. As the Critics Notebook in the New York Times by James Poniewozik noted July 18: “But you have to wonder about the long-term future of topical comedy on major networks, if the owners are vulnerable to pressure and the shows have diminishing ratings to justify their sharp elbows. Jimmy Kimmel is still on ABC, though that network settled its own lawsuit from the president last year. In January the president said that NBC’s owner, Comcast, should ‘pay a big price’ for the jabs that Seth Meyers has taken at him.”
And it comes at an overall challenging environment for our media system. My local newspaper, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, has withdrawn, like many newspapers, from daily printing. Congress just rescinded federal support for PBS and NPR, with all members of Congress form Iowa voting for that unfortunate change.
This means that at the same time that much of our legacy media doesn’t have the economic strength to fulfill its watchdog function, the alternative of public media is also being undermined. Trump has long called journalists “enemies,” and he’s at least honest in his attack on my tribe. But I think unfettered power in the hands of would-be authoritarians is a more clear and present danger to America’s wellbeing, although that’s an opinion. Still, I’m not in a position to act on my worst instincts. Trump is.
Let’s get real. Do NPR and PBS have a liberal bias? It’s a big question and not a simple one, but bottom line for me is that I think they clearly do. More in the past than now, but to the extent they have a “point of view,” it’s a very urban, educated and thus generally liberal point of view.
Does that embedded political bias mean they are unworthy of public support? No, they fulfill an important function for the public in presenting education and information that is not in the hands of Paramount and other media conglomerates. Public broadcasting’s alleged bias, which I just said I do buy into, calls for more effective oversight and more pressure on those organizations to maintain a higher standard of fairness. Not to chop them. We need a vigorous public media now more than ever. Below, PBS News Hour coverage of Colbert story.
Sadly, we won’t get it. And now, even the late-night shows that helped balance those in power with their sharp wit are also in decline. In recent years, the Daily Show on Comedy Central, the Tonight Show, Late Night—commentators there have been an important set of voices to hold the powerful, to some extent, accountable. Yet, with Colbert cancelled, it all seems to be vulnerable, now. Holding those in power accountable isn’t, these days, a main priority for media companies. To be fair, those media companies are skittish and scared because they don’t see their way through the fog, either—but again, that’s an argument in favor of public media, not against it.
In Colbert’s case, the suspicion is that loyalty to “the man” was lacking, and thus Colbert was being undermined by external political forces led by the evil orange Tribble man. I don’t think that the real narrative is so simple, although I do think this is part of the story.
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Ad from 2015 for the then-new host of Late Night, Stephen Colbert. Flickr image by Brecht Bug. |
Which is one reason why I want more funding for NPR and PBS, not less. We can’t maintain all aspects of the media systems as they are, yet I wish we could, across the political spectrum, recognize that we still need journalists and journalism. A free press isn’t just there for Paramount to make more money—the media have a key role in our political system.
And like many aspects of that ailing democratic system, the media component seems to be breaking down.