NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: Goodnight, Late Night cbs cancels colbert, the monoculture (or what’s left of it) is dying, and the media is fragmenting into clarity and chaos From @emilyjashinsky CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert, it’s retiring the iconic Late Show brand altogether. That’s the buried lede getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue. If cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount’s pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it, as Democrats are now arguing, CBS just stumbled right into the future. Colbert’s time at the helm of The Late Show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture. One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man who leaned so far into #Resistance comedy he could hardly get up, has dominated the late night wars throughout Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties without fear or favor. Carson won the late-night wars when networks faced less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible for the sake of selling more ads. By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark. This is partially why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert’s ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn’t approach politics as Carson did. This is the new model: cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others competing for increasingly smaller pieces of the pie. The result is microculture. Monocultural institutions, like The Late Show or the New York Times, no longer can and no longer do appeal more widely than their core audiences. For the Times, this is their subscriber base and it’s why, for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by yanking Sen. Tom Cotton’s infamous “Send in the Troops” op-ed back in 2020. As the “paper of record” for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country. But Times subscribers were furious, and that critical business interest shifted the outlet’s editorial position. (This, of course, was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level with the paper’s narrow subscriber niche.) One of our greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the inability to recognize these institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture. Whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders, plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago. It’s the institutions themselves that often cling to these outdated brands, so blinded by their own biases that it’s become difficult for the C-suites to even recognize what’s happening outside Manhattan — and the Hamptons don’t count... ──────────────────── This is an article preview. Read Emily’s full piece on our site (link threaded).