Nowadays, it seems just about anyone with some recording material and a website domain name can become a podcast celebrity. Times change and we as a a society have to change with them. Therefore, I can see that we may be in the autumn years of the talk show format.
Do we really need celebrities appearing on a talk show for less than 10 minutes only to plug some TV, movie, album or book they have that’s coming out? For decades, people watched Johnny Cason on The Tonight Show as they were drifted off to sleep by the Sandman. But that was then, this is now. You can watch any talk show at your convenience. First, it started with VCR recordings, then DVR and now streaming services.
So, from a financial standpoint, I can see why Paramount Global has canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Yet, I know there’s no such thing as an odd coincidence. This recent announcement comes within a month of Paramount settling a frivolous lawsuit filed by our current President over something that people have done for years on broadcast TV. It involved a Kamala Harris interview by CBS News.
Even though he won the election, Mango Mussolini claims it was done to make Harris seem more favorable during the 2024 election. Let’s not forget that Fox News has done this for years during previous elections. But rumblings were speculated Paramount Global, which owns CBS, settled for $16 million (but NO apology) because it wanted to have a smoother merger with the media conglomerate Skydance Media. And as the sitting President always seems to appoint their own chair of the Federal Communications Commission, things could be difficult for CBS and its affiliates.
Is it is extortion or strong arming? Does a hobby horse have a wooden dick?
A protege of Roy Cohn, the current POTUS has spent his life filing lawsuits whenever he feels he’s been treated bad. He does so to get people and groups to settle. He has the money and clout to drag out lawsuits for as long as possible. But seriously, CBS did nothing libelous or slanderous. (Oh, there are no federal libel laws by the way, despite what he has claimed.) Libel is done when a news media intentionally reports erroneous material to defame an individual or group.
It’s often that reporters get information from a credible source that is incorrect. We’re only human. We make mistakes. But a lot of times, it’s because the information itself is just coming in. Other times, it’s relayed poorly. When I worked in Americus, Ga., the Georgia State Patrol flat out refused to give out any arrest or incident reports, so they had to tell us them from the desk of communications. And sometimes they got it wrong themselves too, even after we confirmed what they told us.
To be honest, law enforcement officers aren’t the most-skilled writers. If I was a criminal lawyer, I would argue the lack of skills in their written reports. In 2009, I read a report on a bar accused of pandering and prostitution that the certified informant was described as an “Oriental.” Yeah, even in the Tulsa area, a criminal lawyer could have thrown that case out on a technicality if they pursued it long enough.
But as long as you correct the misinformation as quickly as possible, you can easily escape any lawsuit. What news media did during the Richard Jewell/Atlanta Olympic Centennial Park bombing incidents could be considered libel or slander. Yet, if someone report Jewell was originally considered a suspect, but law enforcement dismissed him as a person of interest, it’s perfectly legal. Using words like “allegedly” “accused” “charged” clear matters up.
Even covering court cases, as long as you’re quoting or referencing a prosecutor or witness, you can report it without have to make sure you using the words above. Now, Colbert is a comic/talk show host whose political views are on the left. Yet, like most talk show hosts, he takes hits at both sides. Hell, Seth Meyers didn’t go easier on former President Joe Biden and they still went out for fucking ice cream after filming. Former Saturday Night Live cast member Ana Gasteyer was childhood friends with Amy Carter and had sleepovers at the White House and she recalled Jimmy Carter would laugh at jokes Carson and SNL made about him.
It’s typical of a man like our POTUS to act like he’s being treated unfairly when he sets himself out there. Just as Astronomer CEO Andy Byron tried to argue that him taking Kristin Cabot to a Coldplay concert was a private affair, people who often dish it out can’t take it. I even had people who tried to tell me how bad he was treated by the media in 2016. Mind you, these are the same people who have called Michelle Obama a man, made ugly comments about Chelsea Clinton when she was a child and prayed for Barack Obama to meet a violent end.
At the same time, they feel both Eric and Donald Jr., (both grown adults) be treated as young boys. And with the latest news about his health, I’m sure they’re going to be a lot of prayers at church services this week for him. The man has had access to the best health care all his life. I’m talking about 79 years of the best health care and we’ve been footing the bill for the past 10 years. Yet, he continues to have a poor diet. The lettuce on a Big Mac doesn’t exactly count as a vegetable.
Sadly, it’s nothing new that TV networks and movie studios have put the pressure on shows. In 1969, CBS abruptly canceled the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for their material critical of the Vietnam War and other taboo political topics. Ed Asner and others believe Lou Grant, which also aired on CBS, was canceled because Asner was heavily opposed to America’s presence in El Salvador.
Other programs like the miniseries Amerika, about an alternative 1997 America where the Soviet Union has overtaken the country, and the 2006 miniseries The Path to 9/11 were heavily criticized for their far right views. Despite being aired, they were never broadcast again and remain hard to find. There was also The Reagans miniseries that was critical of Ronald and Nancy Reagan that was originally supposed to be broadcast on CBS, before it was moved to Showtime. Paramount Global also owns Showtime.
In 1998, Norm MacDonald was fired as Weekend Update anchor and cast member on SNL for his repeated jokes about O.J. Simpson implying he was a killer. Simpson was friends with Don Ohlmeyer who worked high up at NBC. MacDonald, who no one could argue was left-leaning, passed away in 2021 from cancer. However, old clips of him making jokes about Simpson were trending when Simpson died in 2024. Ohlmeyer, himself, passed in 2017. In this day and age, you can never really totally silence people. Also, more people suspect that Simpson probably killed Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman nowadays than they did 30 years ago.
CBS once again also faced similar criticism in the mid-1990s as they pressured 60 Minutes to air a highly edited segment about the tobacco industry that looked like something an Into to Journalistic Broadcasting professor would’ve slapped a big fat F on. The story was about how when Dr. Jeffrey Wigand worked at Brown & Williamson, a major tobacco manufacturer based out of Louisville, he was in charge of chemically enhancing the nicotine in the cigarettes to make them more addictive. This refuted what its CEO Thomas Sandefur had said bluntly that he doesn’t believe nicotine is addictive. It’s believed CBS was afraid of the segment resulting in a tortious interference lawsuit that might have jeopardized a sale of the network to Westinghouse in which many executives were promised huge bonuses from the sell. This was the topic of the 1999 movie The Insider.
The ironic part is in the last 15 years following the election of Obama to the Presidency, more movies and TV shows have actually become more far right. Twenty-five years ago, conservative journalist Cal Thomas was constantly whining on Fox News about how when he worked at CNN and CNBC, he was constantly being censored for his views. Lisa Kennedy Montgomery has also whined how MTV people didn’t like her expressing her libertarian views. Yet, when they say these things, they do so on Fox News or conservative media because they can preach to the choir. I despise him but I think Thomas is a lot more knowledgeable than Kennedy.
I mean if you look the last 20 years of entertainment, right-leaning and faith-based movies and shows have exploded. The Kendrick Brothers have made a fortune on their outrageously biased movies. And since they are considered a church, they really don’t have to disclose how much they pay in taxes. Then, you have the God’s Not Dead series where the first one made a lot of money but they’ve had diminishing returns. Sound of Freedom was a huge blockbuster earning about a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide.
There’s also been countless other TV show, movies, books, recorded albums that haven’t had the popularity the ones I mentioned above. We know have Newsmax, NewsNation and OAN (One American News) Network. The brass at CNN have decided to attract more viewers by leaning right. Even Tyler Perry movies and TV shows have attracted people on the right with Perry’s misogynistic views on women and Christian values. This has allowed him to build his own fucking movie studio.
Yet they still act like they’re being repressed and silenced. None of them really understand what “woke” means. It’s just become a nice four-letter word for them to blast whenever they don’t like anything. If anything has a woman or a woman of color in a major role where she isn’t screaming hysterically “Oh, lawdy lord!” they consider it “woke.”
In 2007, there was a huge backlash by Christians and conservatives against The Golden Compass because Phillip Pullman, who wrote the book the movie is the basis of, is an atheist. And he wrote the novels as he was opposed to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. No one was forcing people to go see the movie while I’m sure a lot of church people were subjected to watch The Passion of the Christ and Fire Proof.
Let’s face it, true Christians would’ve never bought the whole Left Behind series. If Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the writers of the series, actually believed in The Rapture and the Apocalypse, they wouldn’t have written 16 books, each averaging about 400 pages, over a 12-year period. I mean if they actually believed the world would’ve ended, they would’ve wrote one book like Jack Kerouac over a matter of days and get it in print as soon as possible.
But they didn’t. They knew people would buy each copy of the book and make them rich. Colbert himself is a Roman Catholic who has incorporate themes and values in his comedy. But since he leans left, people don’t like him. I’m still amazed that people didn’t think The Colbert Report was a parody of right-wing talk shows. I couldn’t get into it the way I could with The Daily Show but I knew it had its fan base. Yet, his performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Diner is a classic. Different strokes for different folks as the saying goes.
There’s a petition to get CBS and Paramount to reconsider the cancelation. But what’s the point? Because Colbert and his people know what the higher-ups really think about them, why keep tap-dancing for them so they can get ad revenues and streaming fees?
The backlash has already begun and so has the damage. It’s a shameful reminder how corporate greed is willing to bend the knee to the throne of what is basically a temporary job. When The Late Show began under David Letterman, Bill Clinton was in his first year as President. Since then, there have been five Presidents. Obama was still President when Colbert took the reigns.
At 61, Colbert will probably still be around doing his next show or program after the current administration is long gone. As the old idiom goes, “Surviving is the best revenge.”
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 