Everyone’s talking about the firing of comedian Stephen Colbert from his late-night talk show. His peers are fuming and are accusing the new CBS owners of firing Colbert for “political reasons.”
To which I say: I certainly hope so!
Colbert has been a virtual mouthpiece for the Democratic party and its Trump Derangement wing for years, which is another way of saying he has no problem turning off half of the country. On the night he announced the end of his show, his featured guest was none other than the incredibly witty Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. Maybe Colbert overlooked that when you’re always bashing the same side, it tends to get predictable and boring.
Of course, the infiltration of leftist politics into late-night comedy is nothing new. It hit its stride in the past decade, ever since the night of Sept. 15, 2016, when Jimmy Fallon had the nerve to mess with presidential candidate Donald Trump’s famous hair.
It was a harmless moment, akin to countless others on late night where silliness and light-hearted humor had ruled the night for decades. Everyone laughed, including Trump.
Everyone, that is, until the Leftist Guillotine Brigade rose up to chop Fallon’s head off for daring to help the “enemy.”
The poor guy never had a chance. He was attacked by his own peers. In the rarified air of elite Democratic circles, where anyone who is not like you is deplorable, turning off your peers is a capital offense, a line you never cross if you want to stay in the “cool club.”
Fallon’s been apologizing ever since.
In a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he spoke about “the personal anguish he felt following the backlash to his now-infamous hair mussing appearance with Donald Trump.”
He tried to explain himself by saying he wasn’t approving of Trump or his beliefs just because he joked with him: “I did not do it to ‘normalize’ him or to say I believe in his political beliefs or any of that stuff.”
Those explanations didn’t go anywhere. Having fun with the reviled Trump was a bridge too far. In the end, he had little choice but to admit he “made a mistake” and he apologized “if I made anyone mad.”
Fallon apologized for being a comedian who put comedy first. One wonders what late-night heroes like Johnny Carson would think about all this. What would Carson have thought, for example, of Jimmy Kimmel’s funereal (and quite boring) monologue when he choked up in sadness and anger after Trump won the last election? Yes, let me alienate 80 million Americans who didn’t vote the way I did!
Is it any wonder that the audience for late-night has nosedived to embarrassing levels and that Colbert’s show was reportedly losing more than $40 million a year when he got canned?
Late-night comedy, however, is hardly the only crash scene. There is also basic journalism.
CBS employees have been shedding crocodile tears lately accusing their new owners of undermining their journalistic integrity. They’re acting shocked, stunned, stupefied, that CBS would pay $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit alleging that the network had improperly edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.
It turns out I’ve studied that claim carefully and “improperly” is accurate. In the official airing of the interview, the editors cut out the beginning of an answer that made Harris look totally incoherent, showing only the second half of the answer, where she at least appeared to make some sense.
Was there news value in a presidential candidate stumbling with a word salad on a crucial foreign policy issue? Put it this way: Had the candidate been a Republican, is there any doubt CBS would have given a hard yes?
And for the venerable Tiffany Network of Walter Cronkite and Edmund Morrow, is there any doubt they would have included the world salad regardless of which party the candidate represented?
All those outraged CBS employees now want us to believe they hold the same journalist standards as their illustrious predecessors.
Please.
When you’re contaminated by political bias, no matter how hard you try to hide it, it’s bound to trickle up and bite you.
It certainly trickled up on Sept. 30, 2024, when Tony Dokoupil, a host on “CBS Mornings,” had the nerve to ask a few tough questions to leftist royalty Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, “The Message,” which did a hit job on Israel.
Among the tough questions, Dokoupil asked why Coates left out of his book the critical context that “Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it.” Dokoupil was asking a tough question to an author who specializes in them.
The howling began almost immediately, from inside and outside CBS. Evidently, the interview was “too hostile.” Right on cue, the network ordered a “review” and concluded lamely that the interview “did not meet the network’s standards.” Would they have drawn the same conclusion had the author been Ben Shapiro? Of course not, because there would have been no howling about tough questions.
Ironically, it was a non-journalist who saw right through the faux tears: Shari Redstone, the then owner of CBS’s parent company, who publicly stated that she “did not believe Dokoupil’s line of questioning violated CBS’s standards” and “was proud of how he handled the interview.”
Does anyone doubt that the CBS of Cronkite and Murrow would have sided with Redstone rather than the virtue-signaling editorial bosses who caved to the sanctimonious mob?
The bottom line is this: For many years now, our culture has been hijacked by a leftist political bias that is prevalent everywhere you look– whether in academia, Hollywood, the mainstream media or corporate boardrooms. It’s been so ingrained in our culture their leaders and supporters assumed they were entitled to run the country.
But here’s the catch—they will never fess up to their bias. It’s too incriminating. The late-night comedians will tell you they still put comedy first; the journalists will tell you they still put the truth first, and so on.
The truth, however, is self-evident. It’s so obvious that the majority of the country smelled it and put Trump back in office.
Until our elitist cultural honchos acknowledge their blatant political bias and engage in an honest reckoning to regain the nation’s trust, their party will continue to lose votes.
And late-night comedians will continue to lose viewers and laughs.
