It was only a few days ago that I said that President Donald Trump's trolling of Stephen Colbert after his final show, while funny, wasn't particularly helpful. Ever since it was announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was being canceled, the left has latched onto the narrative that Trump was somehow behind it. It was a stupid theory, belied by the facts, and yet the left still clings to it.
Now, a veteran media reporter is pouring fuel on the fire, and doing it without a shred of actual evidence. So what's really driving this story, and why won't it die?
Bill Carter, a longtime chronicler of late-night television who wrote The Late Shift about David Letterman's rivalry with Jay Leno, appeared on MS Now's The Weekend and claimed that Trump was "personally involved" in CBS's decision to cancel Colbert's show.
His proof? Trump's trolling meme.
Trump had posted an AI-generated clip to social media, which was reposted by the official White House X account, depicting Trump grabbing Colbert on his set, tossing him into a large dumpster, and then dancing to the Village People's "Y.M.C.A."
"Certainly, the idea that he throws a man in the dumpster at the end of it indicates that he was personally involved," Carter said.
It was funny, it was trolling, but evidence of a conspiracy? It doesn't indicate anything of the sort. That said, I noted last week that the meme gave Trump’s critics exactly the ammunition they're looking for.
That's the problem.
Carter’s argument is, in every way, stupid. He’s just trying to promote the narrative that Colbert’s cancellation is some huge blow to free speech and democracy. "The government was pushing to get rid of this man because he was a critic,” he claimed. He even accused CBS of caving to pressure from the Trump administration and dismissed the network's financial explanation out of hand. He said he does not believe "most people" accept CBS's claim that the show was canceled "for financial purposes."
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Is CBS still an anti-Trump network? It sure is. But, hey, let’s pretend that Colbert was some existential threat to Trump! Seriously, the argument makes no sense. The financial reality of The Late Show is not some shadowy cover story cooked up by corporate spinmasters. It's a matter of simple arithmetic. The show employed somewhere between 150 and 200 people (which is an incredibly bloated operation), carried an annual production cost of around $100 million, and was losing roughly $40 million a year. That's not a viable business model; it doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office. In the end, CBS is a corporation, not a charity.
Here’s the reality: there’s no evidence Trump had anything to do with Colbert’s cancellation. Trump critics dominate virtually every corner of the liberal media ecosystem. MSNBC… err MS Now… exists. CNN exists. Late-night television still exists. If the White House were secretly orchestrating a crackdown on critics, Colbert wouldn’t have been the lone casualty… or even the first.
The simpler explanation is the obvious one: the show was in decline. Despite being number one in network television ratings, the ratings had been sliding for years and were a fraction of what David Letterman was getting. Despite the media mythology surrounding Colbert as some kind of untouchable cultural force that Trump just had to stop, television executives eventually have to deal with economic reality.
That said, Trump did himself no favors by giving his critics that clip to wave around. But Carter and the rest of the left-media complex have done something worse: they've taken a straightforward business decision and dressed it up as authoritarian censorship for the convenience of the narrative. I just wish Trump would stop giving them free ammunition.
