If you want reasons beyond ratings for Colbert’s firing, consider his public jabs at the people who decide whether his show stays on air.
As Jim Geraghty, Noah Rothman, Charlie Cooke, and Jeff Blehar have detailed at length, there were ample reasons for CBS to pull the plug on Stephen Colbert’s tenure as host of The Late Show, and to go a step further and kill the program. Those reasons were commercial (Colbert was losing the network some $40 million a year, his still-substantial audience was a fraction of what he used to draw, and its average age of 68 made it an undesirable market for advertisers), artistic (the shrill, one-note politics and parade of partisan guests), and driven in part by wider dynamics (the declining need for late-night-specific shows in a streaming age, the diminished star power of entertainment-world guests). My additional suspicion, wearing my lawyer hat, is that CBS preferred to kill the show rather than just replace the host in part to get out of union contracts (and maybe even for reasons related to Colbert’s contract). Left unanswered is the smaller question of what CBS will now do with the Ed Sullivan Theater.
As Noah details, none of this has stopped left-wingers from pushing the conspiracy theory that Colbert was fired to appease Donald Trump, because CBS needs federal regulatory approval for a merger and just settled a flimsy Trump lawsuit — a settlement Colbert publicly criticized. Never mind that CBS decided to leave Colbert on the air for another year to blast Trump and effectively campaign for Democrats with network airtime, which would make no sense if that was the motive. Never mind as well that Elizabeth Warren and other proponents of this theory happen to be the exact people who want the federal government to aggressively exercise the very regulatory powers at issue in order to shape corporate behavior they disfavor, especially in the media and social-media space — beware people who decry as fascism the exercise of powers they want for themselves.
One of my rules of thumb for conspiracy theories is: Always look for the lesser conspiracy. People cover up embarrassments, in ways that look like coverups of crimes. They lie to conceal smaller lies. Here, we have more than an adequate basis to explain why CBS decided to sack Colbert. But why now? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that if you are losing your bosses tens of millions of dollars a year, that’s not a good time to publicly criticize them on the TV show they are subsidizing. If you are hunting for reasons beyond the bottom line for why he got fired, maybe look past his criticisms of Trump (which he’s been lobbing for a decade now) and look at his public criticisms of the people who were in charge of deciding whether to keep his show on the air. If Colbert’s show was wildly profitable, you might rightly suspect that it was politics to cancel him. If Colbert’s show was wildly profitable, the network would probably have looked the other way at him ripping the suits — just as CBS (and NBC before it) long tolerated David Letterman’s use of the Late Night and Late Show platforms to beat up on his own networks. But when you’re losing that much money, politics is an easier explanation for why he didn’t get fired much sooner. And when you’re costing the company a fortune, that’s the wrong time to also become a public-relations headache.
If anything, the more sensible conspiratorial explanation is one we’ve seen before from failing pro athletes deciding to get political when they were on the verge of getting cut: Colbert could read the writing on the wall that his show’s days were numbered, and decided to make a big public stink about the CBS settlement either in the hopes of making it radioactive to fire him, or at least with the intention of constructing a martyrdom narrative for his show’s failure. That’s not much of a conspiracy, given that it’s just the interior motivations of one man. But it makes at least as much sense as anything the critics of his firing are peddling.