The Media Research Center’s biased post-mortem on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show continued with a May 22 post starring the MRC’s nepo-baby chief:
Media Research Center President David Bozell joined The Ray Stevens Show Friday morning to discuss a new NewsBusters study that highlights Stephen Colbert’s frequent targeting of right-wing figures and Trump administration officials.
NewsBusters’ Alex Christy found that 87 percent of Colbert’s late-night jokes targeted conservatives, while more than 99 percent of his political guests over the last three years have been liberals.
Bozell said elitist media outlets spend billions of dollars on polarized coverage, prioritizing profitable outrage and negative narratives over objective reporting on the presidency.
Bozell apparently didn’t explain how this differs from the MRC’s treatment of non-right-wing presidents, or why he expects a comedy show to offer “objective reporting on the presidency.”
Mark Finkelstein huffed:
CNN This Morning host Audie Cornish used Friday’s Group Chat to promote her new CNN podcast, Engagement Party,co-hosted with former her former National Public Radio colleague Ari Shapiro, whom she brought onto the Chat panel.
The discussion quickly turned into a nostalgic send-off for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. The segment perfectly illustrated the insular world of legacy media’s liberal talent pipeline. Cornish and Shapiro, both veteran NPR anchors, were joined by Garcia-Navarro (another longtime NPR host) as they lovingly processed Colbert’s exit.
Shapiro set the tone early, describing the finale as “so moving” with a “snow globe moment” that “brought a lot of people to tears.” He praised Colbert as “this gentleman of a mold that you don’t see that much anymore” in an entertainment industry full of “big and toxic personalities,” noting how staff revered him and that he loved his family and fishing trips back to Charleston.
What NPR types like Shapiro don’t seem to grasp is that Colbert’s nightly monologues brought millions of other Americans to tears — of frustration and anger — for very different reasons. Colbert built his brand on relentless, one-sided venom directed at Republicans and especially Donald Trump. That apparently doesn’t count as “toxic” or ungentlemanly in the Shapiro-Cornish worldview.
Finkelstein made no mention of — let alone complained about — right-wingers like Greg Gutfeld who serve up their own one-sided venom. Instead, he whined that Gutfeld’s bias was pointed out:
MRC alum and Daily Signal president Rob Bluey pointed out that whereas Colbert’s show was a money loser, in a recent month, Gutfield! was the fourth-highest rated show in cable news, precisely because it speaks to an audience shunned by the legacy media. Garcia-Navarro shot back: “But Greg Gutfeld is literally that on the other side. So that argument, with respect doesn’t, I think, hold.”
Finkelstein didn’t dispute that Gutfeld can be just as toxic as he claims Colbert is.
Bozell repeated his argument on another right-wing radio show to push his narrative:
This morning on O’Connor & Company (Salem News Channel), host Larry O’Connor sat down with Media Research Center (MRC) President David Bozell to dissect the demise of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show on CBS. What was once a landscape of edgy, anti-establishment humor has devolved into a predictable echo chamber and the MRC has the data to prove it.
[…]Bozell revealed that out of 511 political guests tracked on the show over the last couple of years, 257 were liberals compared to just one conservative (and they were being generous with that one). Colbert didn’t just favor one political side; he built an echo chamber that he ultimately couldn’t escape.
Bozell then hopped over to yet another right-wing radio show:
Ever feel like you’re watching a completely different movie than the mainstream media? You aren’t alone.
This morning on The Eric Metaxas Show, host Eric Metaxas sat down with Media Research Center (MRC) President David Bozell to dive deep into the cultural echo chambers ruining late-night television. From Saturday Night Live to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, comedy has traded universal laughs for predictable partisan lectures.
Intern Siena Do contributed her take:
Following the final episode of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday night, MS NOW’s Morning Joe lavished praise upon the disgraced host Stephen Colbert. Despite the cancellation announcement going out in July of 2025, The Late Show was permitted to run for almost another year before finally keeling over on May 21, and afterwards, its only mourners were the legacy media.
After playing a cringe-worthy portion of the final Late Show episode, Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski, Jonathan Lemire, and Willie Geist, who were filling in for Joe Scarborough, welcomed author and historian Jon Meacham, columnist and former Washington Post associate editor Eugene Robinson, and Puck News journalist and podcaster Matthew Belloni on air to simp over Stephen Colbert.
“Stephen is an architect of the culture,” Meacham began the Colbert worship service that Morning Joe and many other mainstream outlets had devolved into after The Late Show officially ended. He compared Colbert to musician Paul McCartney, the special guest on the series finale, suggesting the show was “a hinge in the cultural life of the country and of the West,” because Colbert happened to tape from the same Ed Sullivan Theater that The Beatles played at in 1964.
Moreover, Meacham claimed that Colbert had an “enormous audience,” despite the fact that The Late Show was losing tens of millions of dollars every year and not getting enough views to justify the massive cost, which he ignored.
Do ignored the fact that the numbers on how much money the show made came straight from CBS and that figure — which has not been independently verified — has been questioned.
The MRC also cranked out a CNSNews propaganda piece by Craig Bannister claiming that Colbert represents “venomous hosts [who] try to pass off political hate speech as entertainment.”