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The New York Times has a lengthy report about what's going on at The Late Show on CBS since Stephen Colbert took over for David Letterman nearly a year ago. The Times's write-up bends over backwards to put a brave face on it, but Colbert's show thus far has been a pretty big failure. CBS just hired a new executive producer to fix the show, and the ratings aren't good.
The big mistake CBS made was assuming that the fact Colbert and Jon Stewart generated dedicated following among influential liberals would translate into a mass audience. On Comedy Central, Colbert had an audience of just over a million people a night. On Fox News, Bill O'Reilly—who Colbert was explicitly satirizing—averaged almost three times Colbert's audience. Yet, it seems nearly impossible to imagine a major network rolling the dice on giving a Fox News host a similarly high profile own show, even when their ability to draw eyeballs is demonstrably better.
Still, it's remarkable that the media establishment is such a liberal echo chamber that they seem mystified by the fact that a guy who forged his career mocking the mores and politics of half the country has yet to become a broadly popular television personality.
Stephen Colbert's Show Is Failing | The Weekly Standard
What always amazes me is people get paid millions of dollars to make these decisions, yet none could see this coming? If they had bought me lunch I could have told them this would be how it ended up. Goes to show what these TV execs know.