The CBS Evening News with Byron Allen

Media in 2026 has been replete with stories of hiring decisions, firing decisions, content battles, cancellations, plummeting ratings and plain amateurish / incompetent execution of basic news groundwork. Reactions IN the media about these media stories actually pose their own concerns because those reactions frame the play-by-play in the context of assumptions about how media (news media in particular) SHOULD operate within a corporate / capitalistic framework and the goals of the owners of the corporations controlling them. The concern stems from the fact that few explain the assumptions being made and the arguable fact that none of those assumptions are remotely true in the current environment.

Golden Era Assumptions

News of conflict and failure at CBS seems to be arriving nearly continuously. Paramount offering a $16 million dollar settlement in a frivolous lawsuit filed by Trump against 60 Minutes editing of an interview as a carrot to gain approval to be bought by David Ellison and Skydance. CBS canceling its top-rated late night program claiming it was losing $40 million per year. CBS placing "independent media" op ed writer Bari Weiss in charge of the entire CBS News division. 60 Minutes delaying a story on illegal immigrant detention centers. Weiss pressuring 60 Minutes producers to adopt rules allowing story subjects to pick their preferred 60 Minutes anchor. CBS firing Sharon Alfonse. CBS firing Scott Pelley. CBS Evening News ratings tanking. Evening News anchor Tony Dekoupil having to report on Trump's May 2026 China trip from Taiwan because no one left on the Evening News staff knows how to arrange logistics for an overseas news trip. CBS shuttering its CBS Radio operation in place since 1927. Remaining 60 Minutes anchors huddling privately to discuss whether there's anything to return to in its next season.

As outsiders looking in on this chaos add play-by-play analysis, that analysis tends to fall into certain ruts based on a consistent set of assumptions about the actual goals of those in charge of CBS and CBS News in particular. Most commentary seems to focus on scoring the choice of tactic aimed at achieving goal X or the quality of the execution of that tactic towards goal X. Virtually no commentary is addressing the elephant in the room... Is X even still a goal for this company?

The assumptions driving how participants and critics frame these debates date from older nostalgic understandings of the balance of power between a "news" organization and any larger business parent happening to own that news organization. In hindsight, this nostalgic understanding of the way things use to operate was never 100% true even in the good old days. Most definitely, those assumptions are demonstrably false in the current environment.

What are the assumptions being made?

• News organizations inside corporate entities still enjoy a magical protective bubble stemming from a quaint sense of noblesse oblige on the part of executives. This bubble somehow ensures story selection and editing will never be tainted by crass concerns about profits or fears of offending powerful business, political or social figures. Those running the news would always know what the right thing to do was and would always have the freedom to do it.
• Corporate owners of media outlets are noble enough to view the cost of news operations as a "loss leader" or a means of burnishing a larger corporate image that provides value beyond the bottom line of the news organization on its own profit and loss statement.
• News organizations should strive to be defensibly non-partisan, providing timely information on events of equal importance on any side of a contested topic.
• Even if topic selection and content editing won't be purely unbiased in any particular direction, it will still be predominately fact-based.
• When conflicts arise between mere business interests and news interests, news interests should take priority.
• Business decisions about entertainment content do not have to be proactively "balanced" according to some perceived scale of bias. If a show captures viewers that seems to be positioned at point 0.25 on the 0 to 1 scale, the media owner isn't required to air a program with content positioned at 0.75 to "balance" out the first. If they can find such a program and viewers tune it in, they can certainly air the program but they're not REQUIRED to air it.

The reality is that these assumptions are not only demonstrably false in the context of CBS and its new parent conglomerate, these assumptions are no longer true for any large media outlet. It is ipso facto the case that any large media conglomerate that includes "news" entities within it is already tainted by the forces applied by boards and shareholders on any sufficiently large corporation.

In December of 2024, ABC settled a "defamation" lawsuit filed by Donald Trump the citizen in March 2024 that no legal expert in the country thought required settling prior to trial. Why? Because Trump won the 2024 election and Disney -- ABC's owner -- didn't want to start off the next four years on the new President's shit list.

Comcast sold off a variety of cable channels including MSNBC and CNBC, in part because viewership has shrunk in lockstep with cable-cutting of all video subscribers in cable / satellite TV. However, MSNBC and CNBC had relatively good viewership in sought-after demographics but it seems apparent Comcast felt those economics weren't worth the cost of content on MSNBC generating daily threats of retribution against Comcast's larger interests from a thin-skinned President.

Who's Paying Whom?

The programming strategy behind the elimination of The Late Show With Steven Colbert and replacing it with the Byron Allen show Comics Unleashed demonstrates many of the dynamics at work with "media" in general and "linear television" in particular at this point in time. (Linear television refers to programming delivered to viewers at a fixed schedule rather than "on demand" as saved content that can be played / paused / rewound / fast-forwarded / skipped as part of its core delivery experience).

Not all programming appearing on linear television channels is produced and distributed with the same financial goals. Think back to NBC content in the 1980s and 1990s. For nearly twenty years, NBC succeeded at identifying and contracting with a series of creators who delivered sit-com and drama content such as Cheers, Seinfeld, ER, Friends, Frasier, Mad About You, The West Wing, etc. that triggered a virtuous circle of wealth for all involved:

• NBC paid good money to a writer / producer for a concept and show scripts and the production of the show
• the content won an audience and advertisers clamored to reach that audience by paying NBC more money for ad slots
• NBC made more money allowing more speculation on more writers / producers to find the next hit show
• NBC could schedule new shows after existing hits to accelerate the adoption cycle for new shows, making them the next big hit
• many viewers got to the point where the consistency in programming became its own brand ("Must See TV" on Thursdays), further helping viewership and lead-in ad revenue at local stations before and after prime-time blocks

Did NBC itself create these shows or own them? No. Paramount produced Cheers and Frasier. Sony produced Seinfeld and Mad About You. Warner Brothers produced ER, Friends and The West Wing. NBC owned time slots during these shows and made its money by paying the creator $X million for the right to air the show on its first runs for Y years prior to syndication while collecting substantially more than $X million in ad revenue, turning a profit.

When most people think of how "television" works as a business, that's the model they imagine at work.

But that's not the only way content makes onto a television channel (either broadcast or cable). The opposite extreme is easiest to explain by thinking of your local television station and your local creepy Christian mega-church pastor. For some communities too small to sustain the appetite of a local holy roller, think of some of the national charlatans like Jim Bakker, Robert Schuller or Joel Osteen, who did / do the same thing across multiple markets. What do they do?

They buy ALL of the ad slots within a given time slot from a local television station (typically outside of prime time hours - often early Sunday mornings). Rather than the station having to find content and pay for it for that time slot, the "church" provides the content. The "church" pays for all of the production costs. The local station just connects VIDEO IN from the megachurch to SIGNAL OUT and collects the money. The station really doesn't CARE if anyone watches. At most, the only thing the local station cares about is that the content delivered by the "church" isn't SO blatantly offensive to local mores that the content triggers viewers to avoid OTHER shows the station airs that WOULD reduce the ad revenue collected from other local businesses selling Chevrolets and appliances. (This model is also popular with sub-prime used car dealers.)

Until the last ten or twenty years of media consolidation, it would have been safe to say that no local station SOUGHT OUT a local mega-church or even a more traditional church and actively ASKED to place video crews to record services and broadcast them on local TV, either as a money-making ploy or as "public interest" programming for the local community. It would have been a safe bet to assume every one of these arrangements involved the church buying the time slot entirely and incurring all of the live production costs as means of getting its message out.

In the last ten or twenty years of media consolidation, it is possible that some of these conglomerates such as NextStar (owner of more than 200 stations), Gray Media (owner of 113 stations) and Sinclair Broadcaster (owner of 193 stations) might find philosophical synergy with mega-church content and might apply some pressure to local properties to cut deals to air such shows, altering the financial balance somewhat. It's definitely already the case that some of these conglomerates (Sinclair specifically) supply pre-recorded "must-run" content to local properties who air them during local newscasts. These segments are structured and produced to meld with regular reports but present grossly distorted explanations of basic political and constitutional principles.

What's new in the last year is that this "mega-church" production model to provide content to fill a time slot and increase profits for stations is now being adopted by the networks directly. The change at CBS to dump Steven Colbert for Comics Unleashed is the first notable example. The show Comics Unleashed is produced by Allen Media Group, a parent company owned by Byron Allen, who many might remember as one of a collection of hosts on NBC's Real People show of the late 1970s. The show WAS popular... Initially... The show lasted five years then tanked, leaving only a memory of what most people today view as quintessential bad 1970s television. Right up there with the infamous "Roller Disco" episode of CHiPs.

Byron Allen moved onto other ventures, starting with a concept of reselling celebrity interviews collected during press junkets for new movies, a concept which had only been adopted by a few hundred DJs at radio stations across the country who attended the same junkets to create "content" to fill morning drive-time on the radio. The content was completely generic and low quality but cheap to produce.

Most radio stations and TV stations abandoned the "celebrity gravy train" model for "content" by the early 2000s but Allen created the Comics Unleashed program in 2006 using the same formula:

• The "talent" that appears is typically only paid union scale wages -- about $1000 currently
• Talent that appears is NOT paid any residual or royalty for subsequent airings of their appearance, which are frequent and may continue appearing for years, potentially dulling the comedian's reputation with new fans
• The comics bring their own material so there's little if any fixed expense for staff writers
• Single-set physical logistics with common camera views -- little reliance on camera operators and editors for "live" production, everything is edited and assembled into a final form after the fact, days ahead of airing, further lowering production costs

The Comics Unleashed show is a perfect example of this low-cost, assembly-line "content" model. Most current CBS viewers might have assumed that Byron Allen would be delivering NEW episodes of Comics Unleashed after taking over the Late Show slot. Not exactly. Allen is expected to product 132 new half-hour episodes the first year (enough for 50% of the weekdays per year) and the second half-hour will re-run old shows recorded between 2006 and 2016. It's not clear if production will ramp up to provide more new content in coming periods.

That's essentially saying only twenty five percent of the content airing in that weekday hour-long time slot will be "new." But few willing to watch will likely notice any difference between the "old" and "new" because a key tenet of the content generation model for Comics Unleashed is to avoid ANYTHING remotely current in the material. This approach has the obvious benefit of increasing the shelf life of the content produced but in the current environment, that has the additional benefit of assuring any content won't touch on anything controversial that might offend the corporation owning the network or those it is trying to suck up to.

Byron Allen's larger conglomerate Allen Media Group owns a collection of cable / satellite TV channels all following a similar model: The Weather Channel, Comedy TV, Cars TV, Pets TV, Justice Central, etc. Either limited production costs with a very unchanging format (weather) or recycled content from other sources "curated" into "fresh content" merely by being lumped together with an airtime schedule. And this type of content is seen by viewers for exactly what it is -- completely bland, forgettable content that kills brain cells through mere contact.

The fact that this content provides little draw to customers to continue cable or satellite subscriptions is very evident to those providers which is why they have been unwilling to pay large premiums to carry the channels. Allen actually leveraged that against Comcast and Charter by suing them for racial discrimination and violation of the Civil Rights Law of 1866 by "refusing to make contracts" with his firm because Allen is African American. (Nooooo... we're unwilling to pay $X per subscriber to carry your channels when we have exact viewership data showing a tenth of a percentage point of our subscribers WATCH these channels when we carry them...) The suits were filed in 2015 and went all the way to the US Supreme Court which tossed out his case in 2020 with a rare, unanimous 9-0 decision. Allen later settled the suits privately with each provider agreeing to continue carrying some mix of his channels for undisclosed amounts.

Late Show Production Economics

If you believe comments from CBS used to justify their cancellation of Steven Colbert's show and the selection of Comics Unleashed to replace it, the economics of Allen's business model seem to make a decision to ditch Colbert obvious. CBS claims yearly production costs for Colbert resulted in a net loss to CBS of roughly $40 million per year. In contrast, because Allen is buying up the air time and producing the show on his own dime, CBS zeros out all production costs and collects about $15 million from Allen, producing a "swing" of $55 million from a $40 million loss to a $15 million profit.

These numbers tossed out by CBS seem, to say the least, quite suspect. Colbert's most recent contract paid him $15 million per year. CBS claimed yearly ad revenue for the show was around $60 to $70 million (down from $120 million earlier in the run). To lose $40 million per year, that would require production costs of nearly $100 million, which, after Colbert's $15 million salary, leaves $85 million for the 200 staffers collectively -- an average salary of $425,000. Clearly, camera operators, gaffers, ushers, teamsters working the stage, etc. were not making $425,000 yearly so this is not an accurate means of reverse engineering the real labor costs. Even the writers likely capped out around $200,000 plus additional pay for on-air skits, etc. Guests are likely comped with luxury hotels and transportation so with 2 "couch guests" and a musical guest with four band mebers per night for 162 shows per year, the lodging alone comes to about $583,000 -- a pretty inconsequential cost in the big picture.

CBS purchased the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1993 for about $4 million and spent about $4.5 million renovating it for the Letterman era. One can image renovation costs in 2015 were three times that or roughly $13 million. CBS also captured a tax abatement of $5 million from New York City to keep the show in the city. One would assume CBS leased the space to Colbert's production company so real estate costs are already factored into this $100 million paid to his production company.

Of course, missing in discussions of the profitability of Colbert's Late Show or its equivalents is any mention of the obvious purpose of these shows to begin with. They are NOT intended as a means of paying a handsome raconteur to entertain the masses. If that happens, that's okay but that is NOT the goal. They are not necessarily required to turn a profit on their own, though if that happens, that's a plus. These shows have existed from their inception in the 1960s as promotional vehicles to use in flogging the latest offerings from TV networks, movie studios and publishing houses. As long as these shows are pulling in three million viewers per show, that's three million consumers seeing promos for upcoming movies, albums and books with ownership stakes benefiting...? These same corporate owners. None of those intra-corporate revenue synergies are being reflected in the suspect accounting of the "profits" from these shows.

So What's Missing in the Analysis?

So if all of the old assumptions about how news operations should operate are false, how does it affect coverage of the latest strife? As an example, one theme in stories about CBS News is that Bari Weiss is the WORST person who could have been selected to run the organization, even if one is willing to concede CBS News had issues and needed to change. This line of thought identifies these problems:

• Weiss' only experience is as an individual reporter and op-ed writer, not an editor or TV production executive or "line of business" executive.
• Weiss' choice of "stars" may actually drive current viewers away, hastening the collapse in ratings.
• Weiss' pursuit of more conservative content to appear on CBS outlets won't attract loyal conservative viewers of more right-wing channels.

All of these stated concerns about Weiss' tenure to date all assume the goals of operating a news organization and consistently airing "fair" content still remain. None of these assumptions can be proven with certainty at CBS. It's not clear they can be proven with certainty at Comcast for NBC or Disney for ABC. These corporate owners may not feel ANY obligation to keep a news organization running. Unlike local licensing rules for broadcasters, there are no FCC mandates applied to national network operators to provide recurring news shows.

The takeaway is that the current corporate owners of top "news" organizations in the United States respect no boundaries between editorial decisions within news teams and corporate financial goals. If executives conclude it will improve profits over the next three years to replace an independent news organization with pre-fab content assembled by 20-somethings who learned how to use DaVinci Resolve while running a YouTube channel but know nothing about history, economics, science or civics, they will do it in a heartbeat, even if the country loses all visibility into what the government and courts are conspiring to do to surrender control of society to our oligarchs. There is no assurance that The CBS Evening News with Byron Allen or something very similar to that model isn't already being pitched to executives at Paramount (or Comcast or Disney).

If there's no FCC mandate at the network level to produce and air recurring news shows on a daily basis, what's to stop existing national networks from abandoning such efforts? Absolutely nothing other than habit and unverified, unspoken assumptions that such an alternate universe somehow cannot exist. Such a universe absolutely CAN exist. The difference between a world with a thirty minute The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite show existing and a world with The CBS Evening News with Byron Allen or a world with no CBS news at all is the difference between having a William Paley at the helm versus David Ellison. Paley did not enjoy a perfect record on his journalistic independence scorecard but his overall management arc yielded "the Tiffany Network." Ellison in contrast has arguably trashed any semblance of that network still standing in a matter of months, and not by accident.

WTH