Before that: New reporting from The Ankler.
On Vacation, Colbert Didn't Know 'Late Show' Was Dead. His Manager Did
SCOOP: James Dixon waited two weeks to tell his star and more new details about who knew what and when, and what comes next
I guess he withheld the information so as not to upset the unfunnyman during his undeserved vacation?
by Lesley Goldberg
On June 27, just a few days before Paramount would announce its $16 million 60 Minutes settlement with President Trump, James Dixon received a call from CBS executives informing the prominent talent manager that the network was walking away from his client Stephen Colbert's The Late Show. Dixon knew the news more than two weeks before his client, I've learned.
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The timing of the cancellation news break -- it came three days after a post-vacation Colbert blasted Paramount's settlement with Trump as "a big fat bribe" -- has created terrible optics for the media conglomerate as it awaits formal approval of its merger with Skydance. Nevertheless, multiple sources say the shocking decision to retire the Late Show brand was truly driven by financials as the late-night space has continued to face declining ad revenue and dwindling linear viewers.
Sources tell me it is standard procedure for network executives to communicate news about Late Show through Dixon (who did not respond to multiple requests for comment). The manager -- who also reps Jon Stewart and Kimmel -- also received a call a year ago from CBS executives informing him of impending budget cuts to Late Show, sources say. These same sources say five staffers were laid off a year ago as additional "nips and tucks" were made across the show, and Colbert, who's paid $15 million a year, is said to have helped come up with unique ways to reduce its budget. At the time, insiders were optimistic that the advertising market would turn around.
The show is simply not funny. It seems to specialize in Boomer Cringe. See, for example, this lowlight of Mark Cuban warbling out an awful "rap" about Trump.
Or watch this clip from the show during which Colbert announced his cancellation. He got a bunch of other unfunny late-night TV clowns to sit in the audience and pretend to cheer for them, including Anderson Cooper.
And including, sadly, Adam Sandler. I don't know why Sandler is there. Maybe they're personal friends.
Leftwing psychopaths continue shrieking that by cancelling a terrible late night talk show, they're taking Muh Democracy away and carrying on like perfect maniacs.
And then there's Maude:
Why is the left melting down? Here are some of the reasons I can think of:
- The left is always melting down about literally anything. Okay, this is an easy one. Survey after survey shows that the left suffers from diagnosed mental illness at frightening rates, chiefly in the "melting down" sectors of mental illness, such as anxiety, panic, narcissism, catastrophism, etc.
- The left is obsessed with taking over cultural terrain and using it for propaganda purposes. From comic books to role playing games to knitting circles, the left is obsessed with deploying Adolf Hitler's strategy of sending in Nazis to take over every single social club or pastime that people enjoy and turning them into nothing but Nazi propaganda hubs. Obviously they are angry when they lose the hills they fought so hard to capture.
- The left is bewildered that it turns out that the majority of people hate their mentally-ill, malignant guts and they depend more than is mentally healthy on Prophets and Priests and Witches in the media to reassure them that despite losing elections and being increasingly -- I love this -- canceled, they're really quite popular. They tune in to Saturday Night Live not for laughs, but for the communion of a religious sermon. Losing Stephen Colbert feels to them as a Christian might feel when a church gets demolished and replaced by a Wal-Mart. Or a mosque. It hurts.
- Although I doubt most lefties are mentally fit enough to understand this, I think many do have an inkling -- a fear -- that communism can only advance through mind-control and coercion, and that they cannot possibly win without massive forced contributions to their cult through NGOs and of course capture of formerly "elite" institutions of ideological brainwashing. They know they need to take money from normal, healthy people through taxation and deliver it to the left's propaganda operations if they're to have a chance. Any loss of an NGO or stupid TV show is a grievous wound to their propaganda operations.
- This is a bit of a repetition, but we have to remember that starting in 2008, when Obama threatened corporate leaders that "I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks," corporations were bullied into re-making themselves into Social Justice production companies. The left deploys the creepy euphemism "Whole of Society solutions," which means, simply, "we will bully all institutions and corporations into forcing our political will on a powerless public." "Whole of Society" is really just the old fascist dream of uniting governmental power with corporate power to make sure that every citizen is constantly under the threat of punishment from the left for political deviation. A government in the US can't fire people from non-government jobs for just opposing the left -- but a corporation dominated by the left can fire employees for being insufficiently devoted to the Great Socialist Cause.
The new owner of Paramount and CBS is known to be a Trump supporter. They feel this loss acutely, and fear that other corporations will throw off leftwing control.
And finally:
6. The left is made up overwhelmingly of marginal and unaccomplished people who know that they are failures but reassure themselves that they're Secret Winners because they belong to a culture which features successful people. In other words, they ignore their own personal failures and focus on the victories of the more-accomplished idiots of their gutter culture to convince themselves that they're really accomplished themselves. They have no personal victories; for them, another left-winger landing a prestigious late-night talk show host gig is really their own victory. And therefore, one of their cultural avatars losing feels like a personal loss, too.
This is a major driver of allegiance to the left. The left is filled with extremely stupid and uneducated people who believe they're smart and educated because other leftwingers dominate the academy, for example. They will literally claim to be intellectuals themselves because other people identifying as left-wing are intellectuals.
90% of the attraction of the left is the promise made to simpletons and failures that if they believe hard enough in the cult, all of the accomplishments of higher-ranking cult members are their own accomplishments.
How can lefty losers claim to be Secret Winners when all of the people who prove, somehow, that they're Secret Winners are being cancelled and being fired?