Linda Holmes

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that's right.

And I think you can see that even in the difference between his approach and Jon Stewart's approach, because I think Jon Stewart has always held himself at a little bit of a distance.

And when people talk to him about politics or whatever, he has always, at least for large chunks of his career, he has always kind of said, I'm just making a comedy show and has to me, to some degree, kind of not wanted to be responsible for that.

The actual analysis of what he's doing.

I think that has shifted somewhat as he's gotten older and stepped back from doing it every single day.

But I think Colbert much more was like, yeah, I am willing to tell people that I'm really upset.

You know, not tell them in terms of doing a polemic, but like making jokes that make it clear.

that he's really bothered by things and that he thinks things are really wrong or that he thinks things are really troubling and or dishonest or stuff like that.

And on that point, I want to go back to something that you wrote about for NPR this week, which is the sort of truthiness concept that he developed on the Colbert report.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of that to you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I want to ask you, you know, you talked about doubting CBS because obviously the CBS explanation was the economics of late night.

And I don't think there's any question that that's a real thing, right?

In terms of viewership, in terms of economics.

Yeah.

They've thrown around various numbers about the show losing various amounts of money.

And I think, you know, it is always so difficult to actually verify what does that mean and where are you getting those numbers from and what is the validity of that.