Well yeah, some people cannot handle their opinions being challenged, but you are also guilty of insisting on a hardline that seems unlikely to be the only explanation. If media companies are looking to axe people, it makes perfect sense they would pick someone who is not growing while also deplatforming someone who speaks against their ideals. So Colbert lost almost 1/4 of viewership over 5 years, but how does that compare to Kimmel or Fallon viewership? Without a baseline for comparison, your statistics are just arbitrary. The Times even said that ad revenue is about half for all Late Night shows compared to 2018, but if there are also half as many shows, then the profit/loss should be similar.
Overall, I don’t believe anyone would cancel a show that still draws over 1mill viewers for “financial reasons”. Redo the budget, sure, but not cut the entire program.
Edit: well written and reasoned though. The comment was a good conversation contribution. It’s unfortunate downvotes always represent agree/disagree instead of productive/counterproductive.
That was some good rounding out of the data, thank you. I see better where you are coming from. Colbert being 15M per year is beyond crazy. I had no expectation of his salary being that high. Unless they were using him to pull more subscribers for other shows there is definitely no reason to have that salary on top of the production costs.