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The Night Late Night Went Quiet: The End of Colbert's Late Show and Who Really Funds What You Watch · Responsibly Different™

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Fireside, a responsibly different podcast where we spark candid conversations about media investments and the strategies shaping the way we connect.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Time most of you listen to this, the late show with Steven Colbert will be a memory.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to make this episode anyway, a special one.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because this ending, the specific ending, matters.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it matters whether you ever watch Colbert or not.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: It matters to every brand that buys advertising.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: It matters to how our government is positioning itself in ways that'll outlive all of us.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it matters to you, sitting there with your phone in hand, more than you might think.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I woke up this morning, May 21st, 2026, to clips on the Today Show marking the end of the late show.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll be honest with you, I got a bit emotional.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: My oldest son, Quinn, he's seven, saw me and asked why I was crying.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you explain that to a seven-year-old?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I said something like, You know that guy, Stephen Colbert?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The one when you see clips on TV, I always tell you makes me laugh.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: The one you've seen a few funny clips of yourself.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, tonight's his last night on the air.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I know Colbert will be back in some form.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The man is too good not to be, but not in this form.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not the late show.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And context matters here.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was a fan of the late show with David Letterman, and I became an even bigger fan when Colbert took the chair.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: There are journalists who can speak to his comedy better than I can.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've read amazing pieces from the LA Times in The Atlantic.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The man is genius, so I encourage you to find those articles and read them for yourself.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, the show was a constant.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It started for me back when Colbert took over in 2015.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, I was a rep at a CBS affiliate station.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I gotta be the ultimate hype man for it.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was awesome.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I stayed up watching during his first broadcast, and since that night after night, for nearly a decade.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it was never just another late night show.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: He helped make sense of the world.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The 2016 election, every mass shooting, every natural disaster, the pandemic, every high and every low this country has lived through in between.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: He gave it context.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: He gave it weight when we needed it, and he gave us a way to laugh, even at the scary stuff.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing: the episode is not a teary love letter to why Colbert goes down in the history books.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of people will write that one.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: This episode I wanted to produce because it's about what you can actually do.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: What's next, and what this whole thing is really telling us about media, about money, about power, and about you.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Chris Marine.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I founded a media agency called Campfire.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I've sat on the buy side, I've sold on the sell side, and before any of that, I worked in a newsroom.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: That newsroom is the reason I went into advertising in the first place.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to be closer to the decisions that fund the things I care about most.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Our democracy, the institution of journalism, and our right to free speech.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into it.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you the facts, not the vibes, the facts.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is the part where it's tempting to fill in the blanks with what feels true, and I don't want to do that to you.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: In July of 2025, Stephen Colbert told his audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater that CBS was ending the late show.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not just his version of it, the whole franchise.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not being replaced, he said.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is all just going away.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: The audience booed.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Yeah, I share your feelings.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's what's documented, and I want you to sit with it.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: At the time it was canceled, the late show was the number one show in late night.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was averaging somewhere between 2.4 and 2.7 million viewers a night, depending on whose Nielsen cut you're reading.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It had just won its first Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was, by every public measure, winning.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: CBS and Paramount said the cancellation was, and I'm quoting the statement here, purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night and not related in any way to the show's performance, content, or other matters happening at Paramount.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Same statement called the show a staple of the nation Zeitgeist.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: You cancel the number one Emmy-winning Zeitgeist defining show purely for the money.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the context the statement leaves out.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Just days before the cancellation, Colbert had gone on air and torn into his own parent company.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Paramount had agreed to pay$16 million to settle a lawsuit from President Trump, a suit over how 60 Minutes edited in an interview with Kamala Harris during the campaign.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Colbert called that settlement, quote, a big fat bribe.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: His words, on CBS's own air.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And at that exact moment, Paramount needed something from the federal government: approval for an$8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: That approval runs through the FCC, whose chairman was appointed by Trump.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Within days of the cancellation, that merger got approved.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I have to be careful and fair here, and I'm asking you to be careful with me.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: CBS says it was financial.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Adam Schiff, who was literally a guest on the show the night Colbert announced it, said publicly, if this was political, the public deserves to know.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Trump celebrated on Truth Social.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Media prof media professors said the timing didn't seem to make a lot of sense as a purely financial call.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to stand here and tell you I can read CBS's internal emails.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: I can't.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: What I can tell you is the sequence.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Criticism, then sentiment, then cancellation of the top-rated show, then merger approval.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're an adult, you can hold a sequence in your head and draw your own conclusions.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just say this: as one news producer told me when I worked in a newsroom, if you want to know what really drives the decisions, follow the money.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, my family, we are, let's say, enthusiastic believers in the power of protest, which means that on my way into work this morning, my phone is going off.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole family thread already going about how we're all going to tune in at 11:35 tonight live to watch the final broadcast.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: The idea being to show the executives at CBS and Paramount Skydance exactly the audience they're walking away from.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: A little act of defiance measured in Nielsen ratings.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then I get a text from my mom and I quote, okay, so if I record Tracker, Ghosts, and Matlock and binge watch them a month later, that will not help them, correct?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I laugh a little bit.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: I love my mom.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is kind of, but it's complicated.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the complication is the whole point of this episode.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the deal: in my world, the value of a viewer decays.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's live, there's live plus one, watched within a day, and live plus seven within a week.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: After that window, an advertiser values the impression a lot less.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, mom, pinch watching Matlock a month later does not send the same signal as watching live.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: But then she asks the real question what if I just watch it later on YouTube TV?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a subscription service she uses to see all her broadcasting cable network programming.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where I had to stop and say, okay, now we're in the weeds, but the weeds are important.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: When you watch through a service like YouTube TV, Hulu, whatever it may be, the network doesn't get nothing.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: These streaming and cable services pay broadcasters something called retransmission fees, carriage fees, for the right to carry that signal at all.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's a real and growing revenue line for networks.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So watching CBS through YouTube TV still feeds CBS through those fees, even as Google sells ads against the experience.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Which left me asking my own mom a genuinely uncomfortable question.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Which beast do you want to feed?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because option one is Paramount Skydance, the company that just canceled Colbert and paid the settlement.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And option two is Google, which owns YouTube, a company that has been accused in lawsuits and by publishers for years of monopolizing the plumbing of the internet, squeezing the margins of the very newsrooms that produce journalism and choking off their traffic.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the answer?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, there isn't a clean one.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: The closest thing I've got to this is seek out independent media wherever you can find it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And where you can't, at least support the outlets that still believe in the wall between church and state, between the people counting the beans and the people making the content.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And let me tell you, that wall is getting thinner because the FCC chair appointed by this administration, Brendan Carr, has, on public record, repeatedly threatened broadcasters' licenses over coverage the administration doesn't like.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: As recently as this past March, he warned broadcasters they could lose their license for what he called hoaxes and news distortions in their war coverage.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the FCC's own Democratic Commissioner pointed out that the agency licenses local stations, not networks, and that no licenses are even up for renewal until 2028.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Free speech and legal groups across the spectrum, including the EFF and a Republican-founded First Amendment center, called the threats unconstitutional and frankly empty.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: So these threats may not hold up in court, but here's what I need you to understand.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: The threat doesn't have to be legal to work.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: It just has to make a CEO with an$8 billion merger on the line think twice.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the chilling effect.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole game.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let me pull back the curtain on my own industry because this is where I actually know what I'm talking about.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Over the last nine years at Campfire, my team has been responsible for placing more than$50 million in media on behalf of our clients.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the shape of where that money goes tells the whole story of this episode.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, we're investing nearly 36% of our entire portfolio into Google, about 29% across social media, another 26% in programmatic, that's automated buying through independent demand and supply side platforms, and just under 10% across all the linear channels combined.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's broadcast television, broadcast radio, and print.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Less than 10% for all of broadcast TV, radio, and print combined.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: The channels that for most of the last century were American media.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why does our money go where it goes?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: It goes where you go.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: We are not the prime mover here.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: We follow you.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are people like us at agencies like mine tracking how you move through your day, when you turn on live TV, when you open an app, when you stream, when you actually buy a magazine or subscribe to a paper or turn on the radio.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we align our clients' messages to wherever your attention actually is.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Then we measure what comes back sales, subscription, store visits, awareness, even votes.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the brutal logic of it.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: If I can reach you through a publisher's digital channel for a fraction of what print used to cost, and I get the same lift in sales, then cutting the cost is just better business.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's more efficient, it's more effective.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be doing my clients a disservice not to, and we have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: But follow that downstream.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Less money coming through the print door, the broadcast door, the radio door means those channels have less capacity to do the expensive, essential thing they do, which is produce real reporting and real content.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And those channels are still the only access point for millions of people.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: The elderly, rural communities, people without reliable broadband.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Access matters.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when access goes away, there's a ripple effect on society.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't me being sentimental.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a real and growing body of research on it.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: When local news collapses and communities become what scholars call news deserts, studies have associated it with measurable harm, lower voter turnout, fewer people running for office, more government corruption and waste.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Researchers have even linked it to public health.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Communities that lose local news have been found to have a harder time tracking disease outbreaks, and in some studies, higher rates of toxic emissions and corporate regulatory violations because nobody's watching.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: One report found local newspapers lost more than$35 billion in advertising revenue over 15 years, with around 2,000 outlets shuddering.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a coincidence.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's the game.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So when a show you love, a show that spoke up to power, or at least held up a mirror to it, gets canceled, like Colbert did, here's my honest message: don't hate the player, hate the game.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because the game is built by you, by all of us, by where we point our eyeballs.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the game is getting even more expensive to play, which is squeezing everyone.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: For those of you not in advertising, there's a metric called CAC, customer acquisition cost, the cost to win a new customer.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's been rising.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of reasons for this, too, macro and micro.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: But a big one is the fragmentation of media and the way we buy things now.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: It costs brands more to reach you, more to keep you, and that squeeze lands right on top of media's old way of making money at the worst possible time.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me tell you how broken the monetization model is from the inside.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: The model hasn't kept up.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Publishers and networks know it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're scrambling to stay relevant and stay in front of you while still making a dollar.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in my opinion, a lot of them are still doing it backwards.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you a real example with the names filed off.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I can be sitting across from a major national network sales team.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's call them oh Claremont Skylark to keep me legally safe here.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of selling me on their audience on their own platforms, whether that's their broadcast network or social presence, keeping my clients' dollars inside their house, they're trying to sell me an extension campaign on Meta or a programmatic package that puts my client's ad not just on their network, but on all their competitors' networks too.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it, the network's own sales rep is helping me spend my money on their rivals.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's how desperate the race to the bottom has gotten.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been watching this race since I was on the sell side myself.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: We are finally, genuinely scraping the bottom of the barrel.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what scraping the bottom looks like in 2026 is networks that won't stand up for their own talent because the talent is a cost, and the bean counters, they're the ones winning.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: But, and this is the most important sentence in this whole episode: you still have power.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not theoretical.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: We have the receipts.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Remember when Jimmy Kimmel got pulled off the air in September of 2025?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: After his comments following Charlie Kirk's killing with the FCC chair publicly threatening Disney's affiliates, here's what happened next.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: People did not write strongly worded tweets and move on.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: They canceled.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: According to subscription analytics firm Antenna, turn rates roughly doubled.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: One report, citing industry sources, put it at over 1.7 million streaming cancellations across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN in seven days.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Disney's stock dropped, wiping out somewhere between five and six and a half billion dollars in market value.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's with a B, my friends.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And Kim will was back on the air under a week.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Do I think Disney will ever publicly admit the boycott is why?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: They'll never say it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: But follow the money.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: The audience flexed, the numbers moved, and the decision reversed.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: That is the entire ballgame, folks.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Proven in real time.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: You are not powerless.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: You are the most powerful input in the entire system.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to act like it together and fast while the impression still counts.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to zoom out because if you think media being wielded for political power is some new 2026 invention, it's not.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the oldest story we've got.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: The protection we're leaning on here is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: 45 words, ratified in 1791.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: It bars the government from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Freedom of speech and freedom of the press, named separately in the very first thing the founders chose to protect.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: They'd just lived under a crown that licensed and censored printers.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: They knew that whoever controls what gets printed controls what people can think and say.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they tried to wall it off from government power forever.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been tested before.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Famously, the Sedition Act of 1798 made it a crime to publish false, scandalous writing against the government.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And people went to jail for criticizing the president.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: During the Civil War, newspapers were shut down.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: In World War I, the espionage and sedition acts were used to prosecute dissent.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1950s, McCarthyism, and it's worth remembering, it was a broadcaster, Edward R.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Murrow, on this same network, CBS, who helped break McCarthy's spell.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the lineage David Letterman was invoking on Colbert's couch when he signed off, paraphrasing Murrow, good night and good luck.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, press freedom has been attacked before, but here's what makes this moment different.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be precise about why.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: In the past, the pressure was usually loud and legal, a law, a prosecution, a shutdown you could see and fight in a courtroom.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: What's happening now is quieter and in some ways more effective.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's leverage.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a merger that needs approving.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a license threat that may not hold up in court, but doesn't need to.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: It just needs to make an owner nervous.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a settlement that looks an awful lot like a toll.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: The mechanism moved from the courtroom to the boardroom.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And boardrooms don't have to follow the First Amendment.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: They just have to follow the money.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And follow the money is exactly what I want to do for the last big stretch here.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because the Colbert cancellation isn't just about late night.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a signal.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the signal is consolidation.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Fewer and fewer hands controlling more and more of what you see, hear, and buy.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Look past CBS for a second.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the companies you don't even think of as media companies.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart, Amazon.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here's something most people don't realize.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart and Amazon are now two of the largest advertising businesses on Earth.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Amazon's ad business pulled in something on the order of$56 to$60 billion in 2025.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart's global ad business hit around$4.4 billion, growing nearly 30% a year.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is a real, public, fast-growing category called retail media, and it's projected to overtake social media advertising within a few years.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why does a store become an ad giant?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because of data.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: When you buy something at Walmart or on Amazon, they learn things about you that almost nobody else knows.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Not what you clicked, what you actually bought.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And along with what you bought, what else you bought in that same basket.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that should make every brand owner listening sit straight up in their seats right now.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: These retailers take that purchase data, your customers' data generated by your products on their shelves, and they use it to launch their own private label brands that compete directly with you.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: They see what's selling and they make their own version cheaper and put it at eye level because, hey, they own the retail space.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then the screw turns one more time.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: In late 2024, Walmart bought Visio, the company that makes the television in your living room.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: So now follow this chain all the way.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Walmart sells you the products and owns the data on what you buy and runs the ad network and makes the competing house brands and owns the actual screen in your home and increasingly decides what content shows up on that screen.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole loop.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Closed.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: The store, the screen, the data, the products, and the programming under one roof.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the Paramount Skydance story, a studio and a network and a streaming service all consolidating with an owner who needed Washington's blessing to do it is the exact same movie, just playing on a different channel.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: When that few control that much, the question stops being, what's on tonight?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And becomes, who decided that?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: And what do they want from you?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sitting here with the cancellation of my favorite program.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried to explain my feelings to a seven-year-old this morning, and I couldn't really do it because the feeling comes from somewhere deeper than a funny man is leaving TV.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm actually mourning is a bigger picture this reflects.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is the silencing of a voice that spoke to power.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's the closing of one more place where people could gather.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Where the next morning you turn to someone and say, Hey, do you hear what Colbert said?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: That shared moment, that little piece of community and connection we used to take for granted.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's a signal of our political climate.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a signal of the economics quietly bending, how media gets made.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And make no mistake, media bends how we think and how we behave.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: That is its power.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that power belongs to the people who feed it.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you work in advertising or not, that includes you.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to tell you about a moment from the second to last show because it's been sitting with me.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Bruce Springsteen came out, the boss, alone, acoustic guitar, harmonica around his neck.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And before he played, he looked at Steven and he said this.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to get it right.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm reading you his words.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: I am here tonight in support of Steven because you're the first guy in America who's lost his show, because we've got a president who can't take a joke.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his ass to get what they want.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Steven, these are small-minded people.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: They got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is for you.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then he played the protest song called Streets of Minneapolis.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, those are Springsteen's words, not mine.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: He named the owners of Paramount from that stage on that network on its own air, one night before the lights went out.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to embellish it.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: A 76-year-old rock and roll legend stood in the historic Ed Sullivan Theater and said the quiet part out loud in front of everyone.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: That took something.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that it took something, the fact that saying it felt brave instead of obvious, that's the whole reason I made this episode.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a detail I love.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: The late show's theme song, Ever Since Colbert Took the Chair, is a piece by John Batiste and his band Stay Human.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: You can find it on their EP.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the song is called, of all things, to open up the show, Humanism.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Think about that.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: After more than 30 years of the late show on CBS, 11 seasons of it with Colbert at the home, the song playing him on every single night was a song called Humanism by a band called Stay Human.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe now, more than at any point in that whole run, we need the reminder buried in those two names.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: To stay human.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: To pay attention to who's funding the things we love and the things that inform us.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: To understand that your attention is currency and you're spending it every single day, whether you mean to or not.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: And to remember that when a few people control the store, the screen, the data, and the show, the most radical, most powerful thing you can do is to choose on purpose and to choose together.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's the power of media.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, that's your power in it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Chris Marine.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: This has been a special episode of Fireside as a part of our podcast network, Responsibly Different from Campfire Consulting.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for giving me your attention.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: I know exactly what it's worth.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Go watch the final show.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Watch it live if you're hearing this in time.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Good night and stay human.