DON’T PUBLICLY RIP THE BOSS WHEN YOU’RE LOSING THE COMPANY MONEY:
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.
And that’s where Colbert is today:
Note that Colbert had his armada of writers had the entire weekend to prepare him to come out swinging last night:
