The Colbert [Autopsy] Report -- How Progressive Radio Could Have Predicted The Late Show’s Demise

As A.H. noted last week, H,R,&,R is stepping back this summer to enjoy what is left of the nice weather. While we are not going completely dark, we will be posting pieces that are bit less labor-intensive and involve a little less history.

In line with our new summer policy, I have been tempted to focus on less serious events, even on those that could be characterized as silly. No story is sillier than the brouhaha surrounding the announcement that The Late Show, starring Stephen Colbert, will not be renewed next year. Progressive public figures, from politicians to journalists, have suggested that Colbert’s cancellation is the product of government censorship, that it was a part of the network’s quid -- along with the settlement of President Trump’s defamation lawsuit -- to the President’s quo -- the approval of the Skydance/Paramount merger.

The temperature surrounding Colbert’s termination is reaching unimaginable highs. Thus, Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren have asserted that “America deserves to know” the reasons behind the Late Show’s cancellation. (Personally, I prefer to know why Mindhunter was canceled.) The Writers’ Guild has requested that New York Attorney General Letitia James launch an investigation. Not to be outdone, The View pundit Sunny Hostin has asserted that Colbert’s firing is the “dismantling” of the Constitution and of democracy itself:

[I]f the comedians are being attacked, then that means our Constitution is being dismantled… That means the very rubric of our democracy is being dismantled. * * * We must protect our Constitution, and we must protect our democracy! This is bigger than just the cancellation of a television show!

The suggestion that the cancellation of one hugely unprofitable show (Colbert lost over $40 million last year) is a threat to democracy itself is, to be frank, far funnier than anything that Colbert has produced on his show in recent years. It suggests that Colbert is such a phenomenon, such a threat to the Trump administration, and is so (self-)important that it is a high priority of the Trump administration that he be silenced. However, there are several problems with this thesis.

First, very few people watch the Late Show, and those that do belong to a demographic in which, one suspects, Trump has very little interest. Colbert is viewed by little more than 2 million viewers nightly. (By contrast, Johnny Carson typically had a viewership of 17 million) The average age of Colbert’s audience is 68 years old, suggesting that his viewers consist of Trump-hating boomers for whom Colbert, having substituted vitriol for humor, is now more Jimmy Swaggert than George Carlin. Colbert, despite guests such as Taylor Swift, Robert Downey, Jr., and Serena Williams, pulls in barely two-thirds the audience that does Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, whose guests, apart from the occasional Fox News personality, were virtual unknowns before he launched his show. It is perhaps for these reasons that, while Colbert’s audience is almost double that of Jimmy Fallon’s, he attracts less advertising revenue than his third-place rival.

The second problem, ignored by most commentators, is that Trump is helped more than hurt by Colbert’s continued presence on television. Trump thrives on his critics. Much, if not the majority, of Trump’s popularity derives from the enemies he attacks. For every half-hearted chuckle or cheap applause that Colbert procures, he provokes a more visceral reaction among Trump’s supporters. For this reason, Colbert serves Trump’s political ends much more as a target on Truth Social than as a martyr silenced by censorship. He is as valuable to Trump and his allies as are the women of The View. The symbiotic relationship between Trump and comedians who attack him was tellingly demonstrated by his White House dinner invitation to comedian Bill Maher, who lampoons Trump much more humorously and effectively than Colbert, and whom Trump has labeled a “low life dummy,” “a stupid guy with bad ratings,” and a “failing comedian.”

That Trump is helped rather than hurt by Stephen Colbert reflects the third problem. Colbert is not a serious foil to Trump because he is no longer particularly funny. Once upon a time, I deemed Colbert to be one of the most original comics around. I routinely watched the Colbert Report. His interview with Eleanor Holmes Norton for that show, which I can no longer find on the internet, is a classic of political comedy, one that gets funnier with repeated viewings. However, his most recent message to the President -- “Go f*ck yourself” – laid bare the fact that any wit or creativity, even if framed by his “Eloquence Cam,” has long been absent from his show. Colbert is the living embodiment of Gandhi’s observation: “If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.” While Colbert may not have committed literal suicide, he has committed professional suicide.

The only question that remains is whether The Late Show ceased to be funny because Colbert simply became lazy, à la Howard Stern, or whether its zealotry overwhelmed its humor, as happened with Saturday Night Live. History suggests the latter. For while liberal or progressive politics is not necessarily antithetical to humor, zealotry has a history of producing tedium and ultimate failure rather than entertainment. As long as there has been mass media, political parties have sought to take advantage of it, but, at the same time, they have learned that partisanship and entertainment are a tricky mixture.

One of the most notable examples of zealotry combining with entertainment is little known New York radio station, WEVD. Founded by the Socialist Party of America in 1927, WEVD was named after famed Socialist Eugene V. Debs after the FCC refused it permission to use the call letters WDEBS. Its Board of Trustees included such progressive figures as Norman Thomas, A. Philip Randolph, Upton Sinclair, and Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU.

The station was to be a “forum for liberal, progressive, labor and radical purposes, and not merely and solely as a Socialist Party enterprise.” In the words of Norman Thomas, WEVD was to be “open to full and frank discussion of great economic and social issues,” aspiring to be a “Hyde Park of the Air,” presenting a free forum for the discussion of public questions. G. August Gerber, the Secretary of the station, articulated its goals in an interview with the New York Times:

The purchase of a labor station ... will guarantee to minority opinion in America its right to be heard without censorship. With radio now privately owned and controlled, a station like WDEBS is the only cry in the wilderness. But WDEBS assures to the American labor movement and to all the forces of progress a rallying ground from which to capture the imagination of the American public. We promise that, as soon as we can proceed with full operation, Station WDEBS will be not merely a chronicler of events, nor a vehicle of music and entertainment, though we hope not to fail even in these matters, but a militant, fighting champion of the rights of the oppressed, of all those who toil by hand or brain to produce the wealth of this world.

On its first day of operation, the station broadcast a rally against the pending execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Included among its regular shows was “The Pullman Porters Hour” and “The Voice Of Local 89.” Some programs offered information on and analysis of trade union organizing campaigns and strikes, including coverage of the policies and actions of employers and government.

In 1932, the station was taken over by the Yiddish language publication, the Jewish Daily Forward, and a new station manager was appointed, M.S. Novik. Novik attempted to broaden the appeal of the radio station. As Professor Nathan Godfried of the University of Maine wrote:

Novik recognized that while WEVD could not out-compete the popular programming of network broadcasters, it could perform “outstanding community service” and become a “really significant instrument for labor and the general liberal … and progressive movements of New York City.” Combining the interests of workers and the wider community, WEVD could educate the public on labor, industrial, consumer, and agricultural issues, develop local talent, and present “serious … [and] popular music, plays and sports.” Building a large audience for this programming required, as Novik put it, observing “the canons of good radio.”

Novik created, among other things, the educational program, the University of the Air. Speakers on the station included John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, and Will Durant. Novik recruited popular writers, including Heywood Broun and music critic Sigmund Spaeth, whose well-known show on NBC, Tune Detective (a favorite of my father’s), demonstrated that virtually any popular song could be traced back to classical music. (For example, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” can be traced back to Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”) For his WEVD show, Talent Detective, Spaeth selected an unknown singer and attempted to mold him into a star, presaging by decades such shows as American Idol and The Voice, and demonstrating, once again, that history does repeat itself.

However, the station never broadened its niche audience (Indeed, my radio-obsessed brother, who spent years as a disc jockey, knew nothing of the station other than its call letters and frequency.) and, during the 1930s, the station pulled away from its socialist roots and became less political. By the 1950s, the station was celebrated in Commentary magazine for its preservation of Jewish culture, including such shows as “The Jewish Folk Singer” and the “Forward Hour.” If WEVD is remembered today, it is for its Yiddish programming rather than its political activism. Eventually, it was sold in 1981. As Stephen Colbert has learned, there is a limited appeal for such activism dressed up as entertainment. (Another progressive radio station, Chicago’s WCFL, founded by the American Federation of Labor, abandoned its activism to become a Top 40 station.)

There is an ironic parallel between the decline of Stephen Colbert and that of WEVD. Analysts have argued that the audience for late night television has been cannibalized by social media posts which highlight the best moments of each night’s show. Why spend an hour watching a show when you can get the highlights in 5 minutes? Similarly, it could be argued that social media has debased political discussions. Progressive politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and newcomer Zohran Mamdani have similarly spread their respective messages through social media campaigns that consist of snippets of video. There is no more room for a long-form debate of the issues, such as those presented by WEVD, than there is for late night talk shows. Perhaps what this country needs, now more than ever, is a reconstituted University of the Air.