In private, executives all year have called this what it is (“A massacre,” an ABC exec told CNN’s Oliver Darcy, comparing the lay-off merry-go-round to Squid Game). In public however pundits are continuing to play out a hollow charade, acting as if these collapses are a confounding Scooby Doomystery, or explained by an evil political conspiracy surrounding an upcoming Paramount merger. Poor Willie Geist — I have a soft spot for the guy despite his longstanding role as the Ed McMahon of Morning Joe — went on Today to do a feature about how, yes, The Colbert Report is losing assloads of money, but the political “context” is “impossible to ignore”:
Many factors are converging to cause these changes, from the overall decline of big-budget TV variety shows (TV in general, really) to changes in the political weather, but those outraged responses reveal the biggest: an epidemic sense of entitlement. It’s true that media companies were once happy to support news shows that lost money, as a way to fulfill their federal mandate to broadcast content in the “public interest.” But the Communications Act of 1934 wasn’t written to ensure revenue from sports and sitcoms endlessly bailed out the dimwit producers of error-factory news programming. People like Colbert and Hayes think they have a license to get the biggest stories wrong forever, lose money forever, get paid tens of millions to do both those things, and proudlydisplay all these qualities to audiences without consequence. Try that on television for ten straight years, and life really will come at you fast.