The Hour is Getting Late [Show]
Let us stop talking falsely now
All Along the Watch Cower
It’s been a rough six months for many American institutions. When President Trump started punishing specific law firms for what he viewed as aiding his political enemies, virtually all of them rolled over like submissive dogs. Institutions of higher education like Columbia and Harvard similarly surrendered without much of a fight when the president threatened their various federal grants. And news organizations like ABC and CBS have settled easily-winnable lawsuits and pledged donations to Trump’s eventual presidential library [and off-track betting facility and casino] in order to shield themselves from the president’s wrath [and, in CBS’s case, to hopefully ensure the merger between their parent company Paramount and Skydance Media].
In the midst of all of this, CBS also announced that it was planning to cancel the Late Show with Stephen Colbert next year, and dissolve the late night franchise altogether. Many people assumed this was yet another example of CBS’s cowardice in their effort to placate Donald Trump, but it actually struck me as a prudent business decision.
I can admit I felt a little twinge of sadness when I heard the news, because I have an affinity for late night television in general, and the Late Show franchise in particular. I got a TV in my room when I was in 7th or 8th grade, and I’ve always stayed up late, so I became familiar with David Letterman in my formative years, and his brand of comedy seemed to tickle my brain more effectively than Jay Leno. [And when I could manage to stay up an hour later, I became an even bigger fan of Conan O’Brien.] So to hear that the entire franchise is going away pings a nostalgic place in my brain, but it also makes me realize that it’s nostalgic for a reason — I haven’t watched the Late Show regularly in…15 years? 20? And I’d probably watched it hosted by Colbert a single-digit number of times of his ten-year tenure. [I sort of couldn’t believe he’d been hosting for 10 years in the first place.]
And judging by his ratings, I’m not the only one who hasn’t watched in a while. Colbert has been averaging about 2.5 million viewers per show this year, which is enough to lead his competitors, Jimmy Kimmel at ABC and Jimmy Fallon at NBC. But that’s most indicative of the crumbling of late night viewership in general, as that means that more than 99% of America is watching [or doing] something else on any given night. Which means that, just on the sheer math, most of the people lamenting Colbert’s cancelation, myself included, weren’t watching. By contrast, Johnny Carson was pulling in something like 1/20 Americans at his peak. So the late night talkshow format seems to just be going out of style.
Moreover, Colbert made the conscious decision to play to a liberal audience. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it meant that by definition he was writing off roughly half of the country. He did a similar thing in his previous position on The Colbert Report, but that was at least an interesting comedic venture [even if the baseline politics were the same]. On the Late Show, it seemed like he wasn’t so much trying to make people laugh, but rather simply trying to affirm their politics. And that just doesn’t work in the current media environment. There’s certainly a market for liberal political affirmation; the problem for Colbert is that there’s also many competitors, virtually all of whom are available on demand and don’t require staying up until 11:30 to get.
I also wonder if, after the last decade or so, we haven’t developed something of a tolerance for political critique, like an alcoholic who needs stronger stuff to feel anything.
Wednesday night’s South Park premiere is a prime example. It’s the first time in years that I remember some critique of Trump in popular media generating any sort of buzz. I had multiple friends texting me about it and it was all over social media. And all they had to do was, well, go nuclear — they called Trump a “retarded faggot” and repeatedly mocked his tiny penis [both verbally and visually], while also mocking his eagerness to sue critics and his bastardization of Christianity. That’s apparently what it takes these days to get anyone to pay attention — the television equivalent of moonshine. Colbert couldn’t do that sort of thing on network television. At least not well.
I still think CBS is a bunch of cowards for its other actions, don’t misunderstand, but this particular episode seems more like the predictable conclusion of a long descent rather than a political sacrifice to a mad king.
Not for Nothin’
I said the other day that I wasn’t sure why I was willing to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt when it comes to him actually being involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, but now I think I have an idea. I was reading an article about what makes people susceptible to conspiracy theories, and at their core is a desire to believe. They want the conspiracy to be true, and so they engage in motivated reasoning to get there. So as someone who makes a conscious effort to avoid indulging conspiracy theories, it’s important to avoid motivated reasoning. As such, it’s precisely because I find Donald Trump so morally bankrupt that I have to be careful not to simply assume he’s a sex criminal without evidence, because that would be too easy.
It’s getting easier, though. In addition to his desperate tap dancing and flop sweat over the last week, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May that his name appeared multiple times in the “truckload” of Epstein-related documents that the Department of Justice had analyzed.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone even tangentially familiar with the facts of the Epstein case and Donald Trump’s general demeanor, but it’s still a hell of a thing to have it reported by a reputable [regardless of what Trump might say] news organization.
I mean, maybe we all owe Elon Musk an apology:
It’s entirely plausible that Musk was sitting in on the meeting in which Bondi briefed Trump about the files, and the timeline matches up.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that former president Bill Clinton and degenerate lawyer [pardon the redundancy] Alan Dershowitz also contributed to the now-infamous birthday book to Jeffrey Epstein. Some Trump supporters are trying to use that as a shield for Trump, as if to say “It wasn’t just Trump, other prominent politicians were implicated to!” And I just find that, well, utterly unpersuasive. For one thing, I’m glad that they’re at least admitting, even unintentionally, that Trump’s letter to Epstein is real. But it’s completely irrelevant to Trump’s culpability if it turns out that Bill Clinton was engaged in similar behavior. I mean, I understand that supporting Trump means having to cede every argument Republicans made against Bill Clinton throughout his entire presidency, and most of the years after it, but I personally never ceded those arguments. It wouldn’t shock me at all to learn that Bill Clinton committed sex crimes, and if so, he should go to prison. And I think even the vast majority of Democrats would say the same — it’s not as if there were Bill Clinton hats, Bill Clinton shoes, Bill Clinton flags, Bill Clinton watches, Bill Clinton trading cards, or Bill Clinton bibles. Bill Clinton simply doesn’t garner even a tiny fraction of the loyalty among Democrats that Trump does among his supporters. In fact, I would wager that virtually every Democrat would gladly throw Bill Clinton overboard in exchange for confirmation that Donald Trump is a sex criminal.
There was even speculation on social media this week that Bill Clinton could effectively “suicide vest” Donald Trump by admitting to committing crimes involving Epstein and claiming that Trump was a part of them too. I’m skeptical that we’ll ever see such a spectacle, mostly because I believe that Bill Clinton lacks the sense of propriety required to make such a sacrifice, but also because that would be too convenient of a solution. And what did I just say about avoiding motivated reasoning?
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Southern Cities
Clue: Alabama’s only seaport, this city is called “the City of Six Flags” because six governments have controlled it.
Mobile
[For bonus points, the six governments were: France, Britain, Spain, the United States, the Confederacy, and the United States again.]
Dispatches from the Homefront
My daughters were arguing the other day because my oldest wouldn’t share one of her Barbies, insisting instead that she needed both Barbie and Ken.
“Why do you need both?” I asked.
“Because,” she insisted, “I’m playing ‘date.’”
“Does she even know what ‘date’ is?” I asked my wife.
“What do Barbie and Ken do on their dates?” my wife asked.
“Well, they usually go to fancy dinners,” my daughter explained, “and sometimes it’s their anniversary.”
“…goddammit,” I defeatedly muttered under my breath, because not only was my daughter’s logic pretty incontrovertible, but she’s also five and can already pretty accurately explain what a date is. I thought I had more time than this.