Commentary
One of my earliest memories was sneaking into the living room after bedtime and seeing my father watch Johnny Carson on late night television. I never understood a word of the narrative but loved the band. It was an old-fashioned big band led by trumpeter Doc Severinsen. The music was thrilling, and vastly better than any of the music that replaced it as “The Tonight Show” rolled from host to host.
Never a TV guy in adulthood, I seldom cared much who hosted these things, but it is generally agreed that no one ever replaced Carson’s capacity to capture a national culture, keep spirits bright, be serious when necessary, and generally speak with a voice that seemed solidly American in every way that mattered. Literary critic Walter Kirn is correct that Carson contributed even more than Walter Cronkite to making the idea of America real.
Late night host Stephen Colbert struck me as periodically funny back before everything became hyper-political. But at some point in 2015 and following, he became absolutely unwatchable. This is because he curated his audience mainly according to a single standard: Trump-loathing and celebration of the left resistance. At some points, the show started feeling like a psychological operation to fool people into believing that everyone thought a certain way and only a tiny minority of people could possibly ever think otherwise.
It was around this time that most major news organizations faced a real choice. They could go on as they had in the past, attempting to capture the whole of American opinion on matters and finding that core of truth while chronicling the passing scene. This is more or less what The New York Times (NYT) and the networks attempted in the past. When The NYT wholly miscalled the 2016 election, it even sent out an apology of sorts and a pledge to do better.
That mea culpa did not last long. It seems that the newsroom had become filled with activists educated at elite universities that had taught an entire generation that a life and career of activism was more important than objectivity. Indeed, according to woke theory, there is no such thing as objective facts or truth; everything is a lens, a text, a perception, a “lived experience.”
Under such conditions, no media figure or venue can possibly purport to be a record of national events or opinion. Instead, they must become aggressive propagandists for a cause, else be part of the problem. The NYT fired its newly hired op-ed editor and plunged full-on into hardcore partisan propaganda. I used to read it, figuring that its biases were at least authentic ticks, but after 2016 it became something else. It became a preacher of a doctrine that alienated the dominant swath of the U.S. middle class.
The late night show with Colbert became that too, wholly unfunny and predictable, expecting its audience to laugh as they ridiculed the new president and anyone and everyone who might think there was a good reason to give him the benefit of doubt. As a result, the loss of the show’s market share was inevitable.
But Colbert fans say otherwise. The NYT actually published a piece claiming that this is “authoritarian coercion” via the Trump administration.
Evidence? None. The victim posture just doesn’t work here. It strikes me as very unwise for the entire gaggle of legacy comedians and late night hosts to rise up in solidarity with Cobert. That alone suggests that they know: They are all going to bite the dust, thanks mostly to market forces.
Ben Sasse explains: “Mr. Colbert has 2.4 million viewers most nights—less than 1 percent of the country. It’s a tiny fraction of Carson’s viewership at a time when the nation was smaller. The Late Show’s audience has fallen more than 30 percent in the past five years, and even more among the critical 18- to 49-year-old demographic. Mr. Colbert’s operation reportedly costs north of $100 million annually, and hemorrhaged $40 million last year, nearly half being the host’s salary.”
At the same time, the wokeification of late night and network TV, alongside the same among major news sources, caused an explosion of interest in alternative programming. Podcasts with their legendary authenticity, plus Substacks, plus The Epoch Times, and so many more non-mainstream sources began to gain traction. This is not just because of technological changes. It’s also because what was once the mainstream became the extreme—so much so that the editors and writers did not even know it.
Anyone could watch “The Late Show” and know for sure that it was not long for this world. It’s the same with National Public Radio, so biased that there was no chance that taxpayers would forever put up with paying for this nonsense. I have found most of the content utterly unreadable and unlistenable for years. This is not because I’m a partisan Trump supporter. It’s because I’m looking for interesting and useful information and entertainment.
So much media after 2016 became like going to church, where you expect preaching. You don’t expect that from mainstream media.
What’s striking is just how not self-aware all these venues became after Trump took office. It’s like they went into denial, not just about who won the election but also about the people who elected him and the values that were fueling a kind of public revolt against the establishment.
There is a genuine mystery as to why and how all these institutions could have pursued such a losing strategy for so long without an awareness that they were dooming their place in American life. It has something to do with how the media elites became a subculture of their own, fully convinced of their own doctrines while demonizing people with whom they disagreed.
It traces to the academy. Gone are the days when journalism was driven by merit, scrapping derring-do, and a desire to tell what’s true. Once the academy became a feeder to the industry, the new employees came with all the pomps we associate with high-level training. Denied any real access to American history and increasingly detached from middle-class moorings, the staff ethos became careerism and group think, in which belongingness took priority over disruptive reporting.
The same fate befell comedy among the elites. Where everything is too offensive to say, the only option becomes to say and do what is permitted and approved. There used to be a publication called The Onion that was hilarious and fun until it became insufferable and boring alongside most of the U.S. left. It was easily knocked off its position of dominance by The Babylon Bee, which faced repeated attempts to ban the site. Now it is profitable alongside all the new media.
The cancellation of Stephen Colbert came with the shutting down of the entire show too. The other hosts of late shows joined to protest in solidarity, like middle-school brats. They imagine that their influencer status can somehow prevent or at least delay their inevitable defenestration.
So unwilling is the network to do an about-face on its whole ethos that it has actually chosen the path of subsistence over profitability. This feature of this media transition is one of the more bizarre: how legacy venues could clearly see examples of viral and profitable media rising up all around them and yet still refuse to follow the model with more diverse programming.
This is a tribute to the power of ideology. Its adherents will stick to it even at their own expense and even to the point when the end times arrive, as they have for the networks and many other institutions. Once they all made the decision to deploy their hard-earned credibility for partisan purposes—again 2016 seems to be some kind of turning point—there was no going back.
Now we only wait and watch for the rest of them to fall and the generations to flip, while historians are left to write of the fall of all of these voices, venues, and institutions. Colbert is only the most conspicuous and recent example. The good news is that there are plenty of replacements.
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