Jimmy Kimmel, the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, is disappointed with people on the right for not rallying around CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert in the face of the cancellation of The Late Show.
Kimmel thinks this is a free speech issue (it isn’t) and doesn’t believe that Colbert’s show was costing CBS millions of dollars every year.
Even if you accept Kimmel’s completely incorrect framing of the issue, why would people on the right ever rush to Colbert’s aid? Colbert’s entire tenure at The Late Show has been based on being as nasty as possible to Trump, Republicans, and the people who vote for them.
Kimmel made his comments in an interview with Variety:
You’ve shown great camaraderie with the other late-night hosts, especially during the Colbert situation. Talk about those friendships.We are really close. We became especially close during the strike. We had long, fun conversations about how to handle the situation and decided to do a podcast. Now it’s a text chain — a frequent one. I think we were all shocked and disappointed that this kind of thing is happening in America, and also disappointed that we don’t see more people on the right stepping up and saying, “Hey, this is no good.” Silencing comedians, commentators, whatever you want to call people… I have to say, if Joe Biden had used his muscle to get Sean Hannity kicked off the air, you may be surprised to learn that I would not support that. I would, in fact, support Sean Hannity in that situation, because I thought one of the founding principles of this country was free speech. But people don’t seem to care about protecting it unless you agree with them.There have been reports that Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year. What’s your take on that?I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert‘s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical. These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows — I don’t know who they are, but I do know they don’t know what they’re talking about. They seem to only be focused on advertising revenue and have completely forgotten about affiliate fees, which number in the hundreds of millions — probably in total billions — and you must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows. It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate. Even that — that’s all you need to know. Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year? I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.
This news drew some humorous reactions from people on the right.
How dare conservatives not defend Colbert’s right to lose millions insulting them nightly.
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