Washington Post, NY Times columns insist Colbert cancelation is due to obsolete format, not politics
A New York Times guest essay by Puck Media founding partner William Cohan and a column by The Washington Post's Megan McArdle insisted that Colbert's show was losing viewers and money due to people moving away from traditional TV — stating that's the "primary" reason for the cancellation.
"That, and not Colbert's politics, is the primary thing you should be thinking about when you ask why the show was canceled. The great unbundling of the old networks and cable packages meant that late-night shows were no longer a hot media property but an economic liability," McArdle wrote on Wednesday.
In his Tuesday piece, Cohan said, "I suspect Mr. Colbert's demise had more to do with the increasingly challenging economics of traditional late-night television than it did with bending the knee, yet again, to the Trump administration."
The two opinions run contrary to those of Colbert defenders who have speculated that the late-night host's show is on the chopping block thanks to the liberal and anti-Trump content he puts into his show.
CBS announced last Thursday that it would cancel "The Late Show" next May at the end of its broadcast season.
The network clarified that the cancellation was "purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night," and noted, "It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount."
The news comes weeks after CBS and Paramount paid President Donald Trump a $16 million settlement following his lawsuit against the news network for airing an edited interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election.
Puck News journalist Matt Belloni reported last week that the show "has been losing more than $40 million a year."
McArdle corroborated the network's reason for canceling Colbert. She wrote that "The Late Show's" ratings "declined from 3.1 million viewers in the 2017-2018 season to 1.9 million last year, with only a couple hundred thousand viewers in the critical 18-49 segment that advertisers covet. Advertising dollars similarly fell by about 40 percent, driving the show to a reported $40 million loss."
She continued, noting that the network would have been reluctant to cut Colbert's program if it was generating prestige and buzz.
"But it would have been much harder to cancel a show that was making the network lots of money — or at least generating prestige and buzz. By the time CBS pulled the plug, late-night shows were no longer even doing that."
Cohan argued that cutting Colbert was clearly a way for CBS's parent company, Paramount Global, to cut costs, as it has expressed it would do.
"Last year, the company aimed to cut costs by $500 million and said it would reduce its work force by 15 percent, or by 2,000 employees," he wrote. "Just last month, it announced a work force reduction of an additional 3.5 percent. Mr. Colbert surely wouldn't have been outside the blast zone of these cuts, especially considering the show's losses."
He continued, "While Mr. Colbert may still be No. 1 in late-night, many of us are not watching him on CBS at 11:35 at night. We're busy sleeping, or glued to TikTok or X or YouTube or whatever. The numbers prove that reality — the ratings for late-night shows across the board are way down in recent years."
Cohan predicted the same fate will befall the other major network late night hosts.. "You can be sure that what happened to Mr. Colbert is a harbinger of what's to come for Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers, I'm sorry to say."
CBS did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
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