Finding the liberal Joe Rogan became high-dollar Democrats’ white whale after losing the 2024 presidential election, but this week, the party suffered setbacks with two reliable media mouthpieces.
Congress passed a bill codifying DOGE cuts that will excise $1.1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasters NPR and PBS. Between the Senate and House votes, CBS announced that it will cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May 2026.
Colbert symbolized the leftward lurch of late-night television better than any other host, though others such as ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel followed suit. PBS and especially NPR boasted heavily liberal audiences, and their political programming accordingly skewed left despite receiving taxpayer funding. Congressional Republicans have been trying to defund public broadcasting for decades.
Democratic elected officials lamented Colbert’s cancellation almost as much as the public broadcasting cuts, suspecting the host was a casualty of President Donald Trump‘s feud with CBS and Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance.
Before the Democrats’ search for a liberal answer to Rogan, they looked at conservative dominance of talk radio after the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and wondered where they could find a liberal Rush Limbaugh. They generally struggled with the format, with rare exceptions, such as comedian-turned-talk show host-turned-Minnesota Democratic Sen. Al Franken.
Part of it was that liberals did not lack media voices that necessitated the creation of a talk radio-like subculture. The emergence of Fox News was in response to the perceived liberal tilt of the established broadcast networks’ news shows, though MSNBC moved to capture the progressive cable audience, and CNN slid leftward since Trump reached the pinnacle of national politics a decade ago. Republicans have been protesting liberal media bias since at least Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
But another important factor was that liberals liked their political commentary served either with the ironic detachment of a comedian or the clinical precision of a putatively neutral broadcaster. NPR was liberal talk radio, and Colbert or Samantha Bee were liberal Limbaughs, though they would surely reject the comparison.
Liberals love the arts, and in their homes, the popular progressive conceit goes — they follow the science. They don’t want overtly partisan sources, and for the most part, they don’t need them.
On Comedy Central, Colbert parodied conservative talking heads, most obviously Bill O’Reilly, who was then on Fox News. But when he succeeded David Letterman on CBS’s late-night show, he became more of a liberal version of the parody. He frequently did interviews with Democratic politicians, which wasn’t exactly a way for half the country to unwind after a long day at work, and cringeworthy skits about things such as the COVID-19 vaccine.
Letterman became more openly liberal himself over the years but was long able to conduct friendly interviews with longtime Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole, and he clearly admired the increasingly conservative comedian Norm MacDonald, who died in 2021. CBS is retiring The Late Show franchise with Colbert.
The original titan of late night, Johnny Carson, was generally closed-mouth about his politics and interviewed newsmakers across the ideological spectrum. His successor, Jay Leno, mostly did the same, with rare exceptions such as his support for Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign in 2003.
The current Tonight Show host, Jimmy Fallon, elicited a fierce backlash when he tried to follow this tradition and conducted a softball Trump interview. Leno was also panned by many of the same sources for being pro-Schwarzenegger despite the then-California governor’s status as an A-list Hollywood celebrity.
But the criticism of partisanship in late-night hosts generally ran in only one direction, and those hours became a mostly conservative-free zone. Combined with generational and technological changes in television viewing habits, however, this political slant also reduced these shows’ relevance.
There has, in recent years, been pushback against woke sermonizing in comedy, where receiving applause for expressing the right political sentiments took precedence over making people laugh, though the trend hasn’t completely died. Note the commentary about Shane Gillis’s “polarizing” ESPYs monologue, as if The View isn’t polarizing itself. The Cut asked, “Who let Shane Gillis talk about the WNBA?”
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NPR and PBS raised hackles more for receiving public funds while disproportionately representing one side of the political divide, though they did at least have a long-running show hosted by conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., a series led by the free-market economist Milton Friedman, and a short-lived show hosted by Tucker Carlson. In the weeks leading up to congressional votes on the rescission bill cutting their funding, the public broadcasters who were so attuned to their urban liberal audiences appealed to how indispensable they were to underserved rural communities.
Rogan, like others in his orbit, actually was a liberal whom Democrats alienated with some of the elitist tendencies exhibited by Colbert and NPR. The decline of legacy media and taxpayer-subsidized outlets shielded from market competition could increase the urgency of winning those audiences back.