Stephen Colbert's Late Show finally shuffled off the CBS stage on Thursday after nearly 11 years, and the eulogies from the left are flowing like cheap wine at a DNC fundraiser. There's just one small detail the mourners keep leaving out: the show was hemorrhaging $40 million a year. Forty million. With an M.
But sure, let's talk about what a cultural treasure he was.
The financial carnage was discussed on Fox News' The Five, where MRC President David Bozell laid out just how thoroughly Colbert destroyed the franchise. "He was so consumed with his enemy, Donald Trump, that he couldn't come up with some creative bits that could prolong his career on late night," Bozell said. The numbers back him up — a NewsBusters study found that of 511 total political guests tracked on the show, 257 were liberals and exactly one was a conservative. One. That's not a talk show. That's a DNC telethon.
Tyrus, a regular on Gutfeld!, didn't mince words. "His show was repugnant," he said. Hard to argue with that assessment when 99% of your guest list leans one direction and your nightly monologue is just "Orange Man Bad" with a laugh track.
Even Fox's Jessica Tarlov, who's hardly a right-wing bomb-thrower, acknowledged the obvious: "You can't lose $40 million per year but something is rotten within CBS."
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Something rotten indeed. Let's not forget that CBS just paid out a $16 million settlement over selective editing — the same network that let Colbert turn their flagship late-night slot into a partisan propaganda machine for the better part of a decade. Byron Allen is now stepping in with a new mandate: no politics, just funny. Revolutionary concept.
Meanwhile, over at CNN, the coverage was a masterclass in delusion. CNN's Lulu Garcia-Navarro actually said of Colbert: "We see him as a victim of this administration." A victim. The man had an 11-year run on network television, got paid a fortune to tell the same three Trump jokes every night, and he's the victim. CNN's Xochitl Hinojosa chimed in with the predictable defense: "If you crack a joke about leaders, that is part of living in a democracy." Sure — but cracking the same joke about the same leader for 11 straight years while losing $40 million annually isn't democracy. It's obsession with a corporate credit card.
And CNN conveniently skipped the $40 million part entirely. Funny how that works. The network that lectures us about "following the facts" doesn't want to follow the money when it leads to an inconvenient conclusion about their favorite late-night propagandist.
The real story here is that the free market did what Colbert's writers couldn't — it delivered the punchline. Americans voted with their remotes. They tuned out. Advertisers noticed. And CBS finally pulled the plug on the most expensive DNC infomercial in television history.
Forty million dollars a year in losses, 511 political guests with one lonely conservative, and Morning Joe still sent him off like he was Walter Cronkite. Stephen Colbert wasn't an architect of the culture. He was a demolition crew — and the building he brought down was his own show.
