Correct – youtube is the most watched television – which is good for Google who owns youtube. The point of this article is the segmenting into niches of so called commentary and comedy programming. People who watch The View don't watch Hannity (A plague on both their houses). People who like Colbert don't care for Gutfeld, and vice versa. It used to be that whatever your political persuasion you could enjoy Carson and Leno. But that "common culture" is gone. Maybe that's why normal people prefer youtube.
YouTube has replaced Johnny Carson’s desk as the image of America at bedtime.
Mr. Colbert has 2.4 million viewers most nights—less than 1% 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% in the past five years, and even more among the critical 18- to 49-year-old demographic. Mr. Colbert’s operation reportedly costs north of $100 million annually, and hemorrhaged $40 million last year, nearly half being the host’s salary.
Mr. Colbert deserves criticism for pursuing a niche segment through politicization, 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 Mr. 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. Mr. 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.
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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.
Mr. Sasse, a former president of the University of Florida, was U.S. senator from Nebraska, 2015-23.
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