Stephen Colbert's late-night tantrum finally goes dark | Opinion

Stephen Colbert, the smug host of CBS’ “The Late Show,” is a classic example of why echo chambers are doomed to fail.

Colbert’s approach to late-night comedy was to offer snarky solace to his fellow progressives while hurling nightly insults at the tens of millions of Americans who don’t agree with his far-left politics.

Not surprisingly, that business model, designed to regularly tick off the 46% of Americans who identify as Republicans, eventually failed. 

Liberals have been in high dudgeon for months after CBS announced that it planned to cancel Colbert’s testament to self-indulgence, but the comedian has only himself – and the sycophants who surrounded him – to blame.

Stephen Colbert was a losing investment for CBS

In 2025, Colbert drew an average audience of only 2.5 million, a small fraction compared with the hundreds of millions of Americans who have far better things to do than listen to the predictable jokes of a hyperpartisan entertainer.

In announcing the show’s cancellation, CBS executives said the network lost $40 million a year on Colbert’s show. Forbes reported that the host’s salary alone costs CBS $15 million a year. The numbers no longer made sense for a publicly traded company that has to answer to shareholders.

It’s a tough business these days in the best of circumstances. TV networks, like most entertainment and news media, have been shedding viewers for decades. 

Colbert’s “Late Show” predecessor, David Letterman, pulled in an average audience of 7.8 million viewers per episode his first year as host in 1993. By comparison, the current top-rated late-night talk show, Fox News’ “Gutfeld!,” averages 3.3 million viewers per episode.

Nobody expected Colbert to come close to legendary “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson’s numbers (9 million viewers a night in his prime) or even Letterman’s. But Colbert specialized in antagonizing Americans to the right of the House Progressive Caucus. And that spite-the-right attitude eventually cost him his job.

As he approached his final show, Colbert claimed that he’s more conservative in real life than he appears on TV. It’s the best joke he’s told in years; even I laughed at that one.

Conservatives will be glad to see Colbert go off the air

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t care about Colbert’s political opinions. He’s entitled to believe whatever he wants to believe. If he thinks a democratic socialist mayor of New York will improve the quality of life in the city, that’s his right. It’s delusional, but progressives have a right to their delusions.

It wasn’t Colbert’s ideology that sank him. His arrogance did. Even as viewers turned away, he continued to batter the same old straw men with jokes that bored more people than they entertained.

Truly great late-night hosts like Carson and Letterman built and kept sizable audiences because they understood their job was to make people laugh, not insult them out of political spite. 

Eventually, the only viewers who still tuned in to see Colbert were the relative few who wanted to watch a nightly tantrum thrown by an angry liberal.

That simply wasn’t enough to sustain an expensive TV production, and CBS understandably pulled the plug.

On May 21, the “Late Show” finally goes dark, years after Stephen Colbert drove away many of us who don’t see the world the way he sees it. 

I’m glad to see him go.

Tim Swarens is a former deputy opinion editor for USA TODAY and former opinion editor of The Indianapolis Star.