Why there needs to be a Conservative late night TV host
Don’t get me wrong, I love John Oliver and Stephen Colbert. I’ve been fans of them for years and still enjoy their shows. I agree with most things that the TV personalities say. My friends and I talk about how much we enjoyed Oliver’s latest edition of “Last Week Tonight” on Monday mornings after we watched his latest segment. I always look forward to watching the highlights of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” when they show up in my YouTube subscription box.
The only problem is that Oliver and Colbert (and all of their peers) lean left to varying degrees. While they have huge audiences and are well-received, this obviously leaves conservatives dangerously underrepresented. Everybody deserves a voice.
If you think about it, every major TV station except Fox has a liberal late night show. CBS has Colbert, ABC has Kimmel, and NBC has Fallon. Together, these three TV giants are collecting massive amounts of views, getting over 7.96 million viewers in early April.
When three of the biggest TV companies have incredibly popular shows that all lean left, it makes sense for some conservatives to feel underrepresented. It isn’t a secret that many media outlets tend to be liberal, and many Republicans felt as though they had nobody appearing on national TV to represent their viewpoints. This may have, in part, led to Trump’s election.
Colbert’s recent monologue didn’t help to easy any preexisting tensions. After all, calling the President of your country someones cock holster doesn’t bode well for anyone, no matter their ideologies. The outrage from conservatives is understandable. While #FireColbert will never happen (First Amendment, anyone?), it is definitely enough to rile some feathers.
As a liberal, this has been a hard topic for me to toil with. There is obviously an unbalance in the political identities in American media… but I am on the side of the majority. (I totally talk about this in another article I wrote: go check it out.) Thinking about fixing the wonky media power structure only confuses me more. Changing something that is so established is next to impossible.
Yet, someone must try. It is important to have another television personality on the scene. If a large group of people in our country feel that they have nobody to represent them, that should be addressed.
