Mr. Colbert has 2.4 million viewers most nights\u2014less than 1% of the country. It\u2019s a tiny fraction of Carson\u2019s viewership at a time when the nation was smaller. The Late Show\u2019s 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\u2019s operation reportedly costs north of $100 million annually, and hemorrhaged $40 million last year, nearly half being the host\u2019s salary.<\/p>\n
\n
Mr. Colbert deserves criticism for pursuing a niche segment through politicization, but the digital explosion inevitably means smaller average audiences\u2014and less shared experience\u2014for each particular program. That\u2019s why the news here isn\u2019t Mr. Colbert\u2019s firing but rather the mothballing of the Late Show itself. The myth of monoculture is retiring.<\/p>\n
Political content with a splash of comedy isn\u2019t exiting the stage; it retains a narrow but deep audience. That\u2019s why \u201cGutfeld!,\u201d the Fox evening show that also doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
That, ultimately, is why the end of the Late Show matters historically. Mr. Colbert wasn\u2019t attempting something as important as what Carson did\u2014or his heirs David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O\u2019Brien. As much as they made a meaningful mark on American culture, they weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
*************************<\/p>\n
America depends on a shared sense of \u201cwe.\u201d Boomers and Gen X once found some of that on late-night TV. For millennials and Gen Z, a fragmented media ecosystem that\u2019s insufficiently popular to sustain a common culture presents real challenges. Any revolution would not be televised\u2014it would be streamed from a thousand angles across a million platforms.<\/p>\n
The task of rebuilding a shared Constitutional civics thus has never been more urgent.<\/p>\n
Mr. Sasse, a former president of the University of Florida, was U.S. senator from Nebraska, 2015-23.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10770,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/10770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}