It’s easy to connect the politics behind axing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert; it’s less straightforward to join the dots on why so many Australian talk shows are gone.

Stephen Colbert has built a successful career and significant global recognition by spotlighting the failings of hardline Republicans, skewering Donald Trump, and diagnosing a democracy in distress. With biting satire and relentless wit, Colbert’s opening monologues and peerless interview style have nurtured loyal audiences for decades.

On Monday 16 July, Colbert criticised the move by his broadcaster’s parent company, Paramount, to pay Trump a pre-emptive $16m settlement over a lawsuit Paramount conceded to be “completely without merit”: Colbert called it “a big fat bribe” designed to soften Trump into approving Paramount’s sale to Skydance Media, which is controlled by Trump ally Larry Ellison. 

On Tuesday 17 July, Cobert’s opening monologue focused on Trump’s health, his skin, his memory, his refusal to release key Jeffrey Epstein files, and the increasing criticism form his own Republican base. From there he interviewed Democratic Senator Adam Schiff on Trump’s “campaign to frighten people into submission” by creating a “climate of fear” among immigrants, universities, the judiciary, fellow Republicans, and broadcasters including “CBS and Paramount” – a campaign in which “he is succeeding”. Schiff had led Trump’s first impeachment, described increasing threats to his own safety, and in the interview’s culminating moment, addressed the president by speaking straight to camera: “Donald, piss off – but before you piss off: release the Epstein files!”

On Wednesday 18 July, Colbert was gone. Live to air he announced CBS had told him the night before that The Late Show would be axed after 33 years at the close of its current run: there would be no replacement host; the late-night legend instituted by David Letterman and continued by Colbert would come to an end.

It’s harder to join the dots in Australia between the demise of The Drum, QandA and The Project: sometimes the sledgehammer method can be too subtle to grasp. 

Goodbye to The Drum, QandA and The Project

In late 2023, the ABC said it was axing The Drum because of poor ratings in a tough budget environment. In June 2025 it axed QandA so that staff savings could be “reinvested directly into more content and services for audiences”. That same month, Channel Ten axed The Project due to dwindling ratings and increasing risks, including the costs of defending defamation action.

Presenting dynamic, live discussions on timely issues is indeed risky – especially when it’s done well. It’s also rather expensive. 

Each of these shows relies on labour-intensive formats. It takes a lot of research to find the best guests and a lot of time for producers to locate, secure, schedule and brief them. Every talk show hour belies many more hours behind the scenes: live television can be just as costly, and certainly more risky, than scripted.

And yet The Drum, QandA and The Project served a unique public function. Each program presented everyday experts alongside the high-profile, the famous and the glamorous to advance the national conversation. They fostered debate, got picked up across news media, and kept the discussion going on social media. 

The civic impact of such programming is clear: by showcasing participation and elevating a diversity of voices, it advances democracy – and The Guardian has long been one of its clearest exponents, regularly publishing articles that present an overview of American politics by summarising late night talk show monologies complete with embedded video excerpts.

CBS justified axing Colbert as “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”. As a commercial broadcaster, that’s their prerogative: despite Colbert’s 3.8 million followers on Instagram compared to CBS’s 954k, they hadn’t found a way to monetise his enormous influence beyond their business model. 

Social media, of course, has long since peaked. #QandA was Monday night’s prime trending hashtag years before it became known as “The Bad Show”: beyond confecting conflict, the ABC hadn’t worked out how to harness that influence either.

Hate fills the void

With traditional media institutions having failed to develop effective social media strategies, today its major beneficiaries are the organised voices of hate.

Toxic hate-mongering businesses like Advance Australia don’t need to set up costly broadcast infrastructure; they target the places where the people already gather, catching them unawares in social media environments that already make them feel comfortable and connected. 

As the app culture cliché goes, Uber became the world’s biggest taxi company without owning any cars, and Airbnb the world’s biggest hotel without any property. Distribution is everything: the most impactful businesses go where the people go. The difference with Advance is that they infiltrate those spaces deliberately to undermine them, introducing mistrust and fear.

The success of talk shows is premised on the trust earned by the host. As we get to know them, we get to trust their judgement. We welcome the questions they ask. We marvel at the ease with which they probe on difficult issues. We rely on their ability to draw out what’s most important for us to hear.

Colbert devoted a great deal of his professional attention to exposing Trump’s failures with the most powerful tool available to him: the truth. Just like The Drum, QandA and The Project, he presented facts in accessible ways. Unlike those programs, Colbert was unambiguous in presenting his own political position: he didn’t pretend a neutrality. 

The price of doing democracy well

Independent audit after independent audit has shown the ABC to be rigorous, balanced and impartial in its political coverage, remaining the most trusted media brand and most trusted media outlet in Australia and in the Pacific region. 

This doesn’t stop vexatious complainants from bypassing the ABC’s feedback mechanisms to demand preferential treatment: sadly, exercising power undemocratically is all-too-often successful.

For a healthy democracy, we need to be able to see diverse voices amplified alongside – and indeed, well beyond – the voices who clamour for and secure attention on the basis of the access, platforms and privilege they already have.

The Drum sought experts without the profile and privilege of a media platform, and presented them alongside celebrities and politicians to address the most pressing challenges of the day. QandA invited questions from everyday Australians and put them to a panel of high-profile public figures including artists, alongside politicians both government and shadow. Both formats clearly conveyed the value of having our say, confronting apathy by reminding us that we all have the right and indeed the duty to contribute to the decisions that shape our lives.

The decline of talk shows makes everyday democratic participation less visible to us – and that’s especially acute for the ABC, whose Charter requires it to “contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community”.

The ABC hasn’t replaced The Drum or QandA with any other program achieving the same aims. They also jettisoned Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell – political satire is such an important training ground for smart, highly engaged civic participation – and replaced it with game shows. 

The timing isn’t great. In the US, anti-democratic forces are attacking universities, cultural institutions and public broadcasters – and they’re being emboldened in those attacks by the one person whose civic duty should prioritise democratic integrity at all costs. Having long deflected media criticism by misrepresenting it as ‘fake news’, today the American president attacks all institutions whose purpose is to uphold truth, integrity and democracy. The revolution wasn’t televised; there was no need – the American town square has already been demolished. Let’s hope Colbert makes the most of the time he’s got left.

Reversing the cultural decline

Attempts to diminish our public conversations diminish us all. 

We don’t do appointment television anymore; we’re not subscribing as much to theatre seasons and literary journals; we’re not booking our film and writers’ festival tickets as far in advance as we used to. These changes prove quite challenging for anyone running an arts or media organisation. Will our change in habits be permanent? How much is post-pandemic, how much is cost-of-living, how much is algorithmic collapse? Whatever the factors, we need to ensure that platforms for creative, civic and political expression remain strong – and that means taking a venturous and long-term approach to their strategy.

CBS and Channel 10 are commercial entities, but the ABC is not. The purpose of our public broadcaster extends beyond mere ‘content’. To ensure the ABC continues to foster our town squares, its strategy must connect explicitly and carefully to its civic function. 

Could this be the next frontier for public broadcasting: imaginatively connecting with audiences where they already are? If the biggest audiences for talk shows are on social media, how can public broadcasting thrive beyond its transmission infrastructure? How can it succeed without profiting third-party ‘content’ providers at the cost of its own viability? How can it avoid lending its hard-earned brand integrity to platforms whose algorithms feed hate?

The cost of doing democracy well is not one we can afford to appreciate only once its lost. It can’t be outfits like Advance Australia who emerge as the beneficiaries of cultural decline.

These are big questions, tough challenges – and urgent ones. Any solution must nurture truth, integrity and democracy: what we say, the ways we say it, and how we can all participate. If that sounds expensive to produce from a broadcast perspective, can you imagine the cost of the alternative? I can’t – but what I do know is that we can’t afford it.