CBS parent Paramount insists that this week's decision to cancel Steven Colbert's “Late Show” was strictly financial, and had nothing to do with politics. Skeptics abound — Colbert has been a fierce critic of President Donald Trump — but there's no denying the economics of television are not looking good. TV is rapidly losing eyeballs to streaming services and making hard decisions about programming. Late-night was once a valuable audience for advertisers because the genre had a lot of hard-to-reach young men. Now many of them are streaming, either to watch something else or see highlights of late-night comics that are hard for networks to monetize.

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Elayna Cunningham, a college student interning at Koahnic Broadcast Corp., records a program on July 10, 2025, at the Anchorage, Alaska, studios of KNBA, the flagship station for National Native News. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)

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Elayna Cunningham, a college student interning at Koahnic Broadcast Corp., records a program in Studio 3 on July 10, 2025, at the Anchorage, Alaska, studios of KNBA, the flagship station for National Native News. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)