Colbert’s demise marks the end of late-night TV and of the era of a common culture
Our common culture has fallen victim to the digital revolution.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are certain Stephen Colbert is the victim of politics. It’s true that his Late Show has lately been the No.1 program, of its format, in its slot, on the legacy networks. But that’s a load of qualifiers for a show on broadcast television, which hardly anyone watches anymore. YouTube has replaced Johnny Carson’s desk as the image of America at bedtime.
Colbert has 2.4 million viewers most nights – less than 1 per cent of the country. It’s a tiny fraction of Carson’s viewership at a time when the nation was smaller. The Late Show’s audience has fallen more than 30 per cent in the past five years, and even more among the critical 18-49-year-old demographic. Colbert’s operation reportedly costs north of $US100m ($153m) annually, and haemorrhaged $US40m last year, nearly half being the host’s salary.
Colbert deserves criticism for pursuing a niche segment through politicisation, but the digital explosion inevitably means smaller average audiences – and less shared experience – for each particular program. That’s why the news here isn’t Colbert’s firing but rather the mothballing of The Late Show itself. The myth of monoculture is retiring.
Political content with a splash of comedy isn’t exiting the stage; it retains a narrow but deep audience. That’s why Gutfeld!, the Fox evening show that also doesn’t attempt to persuade or entertain beyond its core audience, has a significantly larger viewership than The Late Show. But it does so on cable, not pretending to be a part of a broadcast common culture.
That, ultimately, is why the end of The Late Show matters historically. Colbert wasn’t attempting something as important as what Carson did – or his heirs, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. As much as they made a meaningful mark on American culture, they weren’t essential to the life of the republic. But this fading of an era is occasion to acknowledge that having some shared things does matter to a stable political culture.
The Founders fully understood. When Publius wrote about the preconditions for a free society in Federalist 2, he declared Americans “one united people … speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government”. The US constitution requires a certain amount of unity, at least a minimal shared conception of the common good. The monoculture of the 20th century was by no means robust enough for what the Founders thought we must share, but as it fades to black and we’re increasingly siloed by algorithms and the digitisation of daily life, it’s important to understand together that we’ll likely never again have a shared mass culture to unite us.
America depends on a shared sense of “we”. Boomers and Gen X once found some of that on late-night TV. For millennials and Gen Z, a fragmented media ecosystem that’s insufficiently popular to sustain a common culture presents real challenges. Any revolution would not be televised – it would be streamed from a thousand angles across a million platforms.
The task of rebuilding a shared constitutional civics thus has never been more urgent.
Ben Sasse, a former president of the University of Florida, was US senator from Nebraska, 2015-23.
The Wall Street Journal
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