When Stephen Colbert first took over The Late Show on CBS back in 2015, he flopped.
For most of his first year behind the desk that had been David Letterman’s home base since 1993, Colbert seemed to struggle to find his own identity as a late-night host, and the ratings reflected his discomfort. The Late Show was often in third place, behind Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show on NBC and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. The execs were sweating.
The problem, as it so often is in life, was authenticity. Stephen Colbert was not your standard stand-up comedian inheriting a late-night gig. He was a brilliant, excoriating political satirist; more Kurt Vonnegut than Rodney Dangerfield. He’d spent years on Comedy Central, first at The Daily Show and then with his own The Colbert Report, honing his satire, developing a delightfully bombastic character based on Fox News stars like Bill O’Reilly, and skewering the bullshit patriotism and holier-than-thou religiosity (“This Week in God”) that has come to be the brand identity of so much of the bullyboy Right in America.
At the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Colbert gleefully shattered the fourth wall and shocked official Washington to its core. He brought his character—whom he once described as a “poorly informed, high-status idiot”—to that holy of holies, that pompous annual ritual of self-congratulation, celebrity worship, and sucking up to power, and he laughed in its face. And the country laughed right with him. No one got out of that room unscathed. Including me.
But by 2015, Colbert seemed to have left his bite, his gift for going after the bigwigs and rendering them ridiculous in the public mind, behind him. Enter Donald Trump. The election of 2016 came as a godsend to a man with Colbert’s talents, and he quickly pivoted back to politics. He found his late-night voice, thanks to Trump and the MAGA movement, and he turned The Late Show into a ratings powerhouse. Critics raved. Vanity Fair called him “the conscience of late night,” Variety dubbed him “a moral anchor in the noise.” CBS executives bragged about how Colbert’s success “validated our strategy” and “elevated our entire brand.”
That was then. This is now.
Last night, Stephen Colbert announced that the current bigwigs at CBS and Paramount Global, which owns CBS, were abruptly canceling The Late Show. Though it remains the most watched program in late-night television, the show will end at the conclusion of its current season. There will be no successor to Colbert.
Top CBS executives announced in a joint statement (the buck never actually stops anywhere these days) that canceling The Late Show was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”
“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content, or other matters happening at Paramount,” the executives added.
OK. I get it.
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT $8-BILLION-PARAMOUNT-SKYDANCE-DEAL-STUCK-IN REGULATORY-LIMBO-PENDING-APPROVAL-FROM-DONALD TRUMP’S-FCC BEHIND THE CURTAIN!”
Do they really think we’re that stupid?
I know firsthand that times are tough for late-night TV. For several years, between 2005 and 2013, I co-anchored “Nightline” for ABC News, and so I have some understanding of that world. Twenty years ago, late-night hosts (and "Nightline,” too) still had healthy audiences and genuine cultural impact. But now the shows wither by the week, and their relevance to the national conversation fades. The audiences age relentlessly, with more and more people leaving TV altogether and older people…leaving. It’s just a demographic fact that what the media analysts call “linear TV” is a dying business.
But c’mon. It’s still a business. And one thing I know about media executives is that if they can squeeze more money out of programming by cutting costs, laying off workers, recasting the show with a new host or hosts (who would get paid a fraction of what the stars of yesteryear got paid), they’ll do it. Brands don’t grow on trees in this cluttered media environment.
But CBS wants out.
It is impossible to ignore the timing here. As Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out, Colbert just days ago ripped into Paramount for agreeing to pay President Trump $16 million to settle his utterly meritless lawsuit against 60 Minutes. Colbert called that payout “a big, fat bribe.”
And now he’s lost his job. Huh. I know a little about that, too.
Stephen Colbert’s corporate canceling comes as many major institutions in America are bending the knee to Trump, sometimes in response to pressure, and sometimes merely in anticipation of potential trouble from an administration that seeks to dominate so many areas of our national life.
In December last year, Disney/ABC settled what most legal observers considered to be an easily winnable defamation lawsuit involving my former colleague George Stephanopoulos by agreeing to pay $15 million to the Trump library (I have no personal knowledge of that decision, but the public fact of it speaks for itself).
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, once a fierce critic of Trump and now a fawning supporter, has neutered The Washington Post, which he owns, quashing an editorial he didn’t like and banning any opinion articles that do not align with his version of what “personal liberties and free markets” look like.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook, Instagram etc), like many corporate chieftains, went from championing diversity, equity and inclusion policies to curtailing them. He also announced the company would end its factchecking program and decided to allow users of his platforms to post attacks on gay people by calling them “mentally ill.”
Google renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, FFS.
And on and on and on.
The truth is, none of these companies ever really cared about the ideals they once proclaimed to be their guiding lights. It was all a charade; good business for a while, bad business now.
And that is why a basic truth of these troubled times must be recognized: The corporations will always knuckle under to Trump. Silence and complicity are good business under a MAGA regime.
Until they are not. The only thing corporations and the men and women who run them truly respond to is the bottom line. That’s where we come in. Throughout our history, corporations have responded to mass public pressure and changed their policies because of it. Woolworth’s desegregated its lunch counters. Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling assault rifles. IBM cut ties with South Africa. There’s a grand tradition among American consumers of calling out corporations, standing up to them, and forcing them to change.
The lesson is clear: Don’t get mad. Get even. Use your power as consumers, use your voices as citizens, to shame and to shape the actions of corporations that depend on you to thrive.
Don’t be disheartened or afraid. Rise up.