Remember that hoary question from Philosophy 101 — If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a noise? Well, we now have a television equivalent.
Yesterday, Stephen Colbert’s fans in New York staged a protest to convince CBS and Paramount that they had made a big mistake in cancelling The Late Show and declining to renew the host’s contract. So how many fans does Colbert have — in a city of nine million people, where his show tapes five nights a week?
Enough to make a noise … but not the noise they wanted:
A Big Apple rally in support of on-his-way-out “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert drew fewer than two dozen people Sunday — with even the NYPD cops on scene quickly calling it a day since most of the demonstrators left after just a few minutes.
Organizers said the “We’re With Colbert” gathering outside the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side said it was meant to be part of a nationwide call for “integrity.” …
CBS said declining viewership and diminishing profits led to its decision to end the show in May 2026, effectively firing the 61-year-old talk-show host Colbert — but critics claim the network bowed to pressure from Trump.
Come on, man. Twenty protesters in Manhattan? There are longer queues for Starbucks shops, even on the weekend. That’s not a protest. It’s barely a drum circle at an Occupy Wall Street event.
One has to wonder who organized this, and why. If I were more conspiratorially minded, I’d wonder whether CBS, Paramount, or Skydance arranged it to prove their point. They let Colbert run out the string, but he’s nowhere near as popular or important as Colbert thinks, nor as the Protection Racket Media and Democrat officials seem to think either. Colbert’s audience fled over the past few years as Regime Comedy got more and more stale. He will disappear from late night television at some point, and no one will care.
Since I prefer to apply Hanlon’s Razor to such developments, I will instead assume that CBS/Paramount/Skydance execs are the happy beneficiaries of the cluelessness of Colbert and his protestors. The half-busload set out to prove something this weekend, and they did. They proved themselves and their hero to be utterly clueless, and vindicated the network execs.
Maybe the dozen-plus fans of Colbert should have asked Jay Leno to explain what happened. In an interview with Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, Leno wondered why his successors in the genre chose political sides and alienated their potential audiences:
“Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole?” Leno, 75, told Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation CEO David Trulio during a recent interview.
“I don’t understand why you would alienate one particular group, you know, or just don’t do it at all,” the former “Tonight Show” host said. “I’m not saying you have to throw your support or whatever, but just do what’s funny.” …
“I like to think that people come to a comedy show to kind of get away from the things, you know, the pressures of life, whatever it might be,” Leno said. “And I love political humor, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just what happens when people wind up cozying too much to one side or the other.
“You have to be content with half the audience because you have [to] give your opinion.”
Given the number that showed up for the protest in Manhattan — not exactly MAGA Country — I’d say they’re settling for a lot less than half of the potential audience. And it’s not just the comedy either, such as that is. Newsbusters took a look at the guest list for all late-night TV shows in 2025, and guess what they found?
For the men of the late night comedy talk shows, the first half of 2025 was an instance of history repeating itself. According to a NewsBusters study, 99 percent of their political guests were on the left, matching the result for the last six months of 2024.
The grand totals were 106 liberals and Democrats compared to one conservative.
The study looked at the five daily late night comedy shows: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show from January 6 through June 30.
MRC analysts also divided the guests into two categories: partisan officials and then journalists and celebrities.
When it came to partisan officials, the count was 30 Democrats to 0 Republicans.
By golly, these are Occupy Wall Street drum circles! And TV audiences got tired of Colbert banging his drum. We’ll see if Fallon, Kimmel, Myers, and Stewart figure it out, or will eventually see their own struggle sessions migrate to the sidewalk.
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