Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with the future of sports on the shrinking platform of broadcast television.
There are any number of takeaways from the Paramount-Skydance merger, which finally won approval last week after a regulatory pressure campaign that cost Paramount millions of dollars — to say nothing of the upheaval within its news and late-night entertainment division. CBS Sports has not only escaped the crucible unscathed, but in seemingly good position. “New Paramount” is expected to prioritize sports even as it devalues news and eliminates late night entirely.
But in a broadcast television landscape where longtime staples are suddenly no longer essential, how much longer can sports swim against the tide? Sports may benefit in the short term as the rest of broadcast television falls by the wayside, but the ultimate outcome is harder to predict.
The looming cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” has been one of the major media stories of the month. CBS has maintained that the decision is “purely financial,” a rationale that has no shortage of skeptics — there may be no company in all of media less worthy of benefit of the doubt than Paramount — but also no shortage of data to back it up.
CBS has spent much of the past two weeks strategically leaking numbers about Colbert’s show, and however one may feel about that PR strategy, so long as the numbers are accurate, they tell a pretty clear story. Colbert is still #1 in late night, a distinction that means less and less by the year. The more important number is his advertising revenue, which still trails “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” despite that show’s considerably smaller audience. He lags online, again well behind “Tonight.”
As anyone who reads this site knows, it is not necessarily the most important thing to average the largest audience, but to have the right audience mix that advertisers are looking for. A median age of 68 is not going to cut it, especially given the amount of money it apparently costs to produce.
Perhaps it was not “purely” financial, and perhaps the timing is not a coincidence. But it is hard to look at the state of late night and believe that Colbert, who is 61 and still seven years younger than his median viewer, would have lasted beyond one more renewal even without influence from Washington.
One might ask why is a sports media column discussing late-night television. Because broadcast television is changing rapidly in ways that will elevate sports’ presence in the near term, but potentially threaten the industry in the long-term.
Start with the fact that CBS is not replacing Colbert, but instead cancelling “The Late Show” altogether. In the days of Johnny Carson, the other networks struggled to find similar success. They struck out most of the time, sometimes horrendously (Chevy Chase), making the hits all the sweeter. CBS established its foothold in late night with David Letterman, expanded to include a second show hosted by Tom Snyder (and later ESPN’s Craig Kilborn) and finally under Colbert conquered the #1 spot in late night. And then pulled the plug on all of it.
There is a certain rhythm to network TV. A morning show to start you off, then some mixture of game shows, talk shows and soaps to get you to midday, and then — with some breaks for affiliate programming — evening news, primetime, and late night variety shows. Networks have sometimes flirted with alternatives; it was not so long ago that NBC made the disastrous decision to turn the 10 PM ET hour over to Jay Leno and thought about ceding it altogether to the affiliates. But for the “Big Three” in particular, the recipe has been unchanged for decades.
Few if any have written about what CBS will do next in the late-night slot. During the interim period between the Letterman and Colbert versions of “The Late Show” in 2015, the network aired reruns of its primetime shows. Perhaps CBS will go back to the rerun well, or go with something cheap like reruns of Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed,” a show that ended more than a decade ago but nonetheless populates the 12:30 AM ET slot once occupied by “The Late Late Show.”
No matter what, it seems unlikely the network will create another expensive, attention-grabbing centerpiece. It seems less like Paramount is getting out of the Colbert business — or even the late night comedy business — and beginning its exit from the ‘broadcast television’ business.
That is of course a weighty claim. Is CBS going away? No, not yet anyway. But ‘broadcast television’ is not just a method of distribution, it is a style. It is an all-things-to-all-people combination of distinct genres in distinct dayparts, overlaid with an obligation to serve viewers in accordance with the ‘public interest’ (however that is interpreted by the regulators).
Based on the reporting about the Skydance-Paramount merger, it does not seem like the new leadership is all that interested in being all-things-to-all-people. Instead, the approach seems to be to focus on specific revenue drivers like sports (and because Skydance is a production studio, movies and television series).
In that way, Skydance may be following in the footsteps of a similarly sized media company, Fox Corporation. One might have noticed that FOX barely qualifies as ‘broadcast television’ anymore. Since the parent company sold off most of its assets in a deal with Disney, the FOX network has scaled back programming to its adult animation shows, game shows, reality television and, perhaps its sole reason for continuing to exist: sports.
Traditionally, sports on broadcast television are limited to weekend afternoons, with the exception of a few nights in primetime that are given to only the highest-tier sports properties. Today, FOX airs pretty much any sport at pretty much any time. LIV Golf might air in a weekday afternoon or weekend morning window. Rugby might air in primetime. College football might start at 11 PM ET. These are programming decisions that one might make for a cable sports network, which is increasingly what FOX appears to be. Will CBS follow the same path?
CBS has set the precedent that it does not have to compete in late night, which opens the door to not having to compete in the morning, the evening, or any daypart that is costing more money than it is worth.
Why would “60 Minutes” remain sacrosanct on Sunday evenings, when the new ownership clearly has no particular value for CBS News and CBS could develop an NFL postgame show instead? Why would a network that has given up on its first-place late night show continue to settle for third-place in the mornings and evenings? (The network’s morning show struggle is so old that it was once the subject of a joke on “The Golden Girls”: “Two World Wars, a Polish pope and now this. I may live to see CBS come up with a morning show yet,” said Sophia in one episode.)
Sports, of course, could not fill all of those openings. Beyond the simple fact that there are not always games of value to fill those slots, affiliates still have to be considered. But it is impossible to imagine that the trends that have already begun at CBS — which has already carried sporting events with six-figure audiences in weeknight primetime — will not accelerate in the coming years.
The real question is not whether sports will immediately benefit from the decline of other programming on CBS, but what happens to the king of the jungle if all other species go extinct. A CBS that is simply sports and movies is functionally TNT, and TNT is not exactly on firm ground.
As previously argued in this column, all of the drama surrounding the Paramount-Skydance deal has overshadowed the reality that there is nothing about the merger that fixes the main problem facing CBS and all other linear networks. If one takes them at their word, Paramount canceled “The Late Show” because competing in late night was no longer worth it financially. Perhaps that logic will hit the morning news, the evening news, “60 Minutes” — maybe even “The Price is Right.”
Will that logic eventually apply to sports? It seems impossible to imagine that one day the cost of live sports will make owning the rights no longer worth it to the networks, if for no other reason than people have been predicting that outcome for decades with no success. It was the CBS Sports president Neil Pilson who said 40 years ago that “the golden goose of television isn’t going to continue laying larger eggs for sports organizations and athletes indefinitely.”
If live sports is ‘the last one standing’ for broadcast television, any decision to exit the space will ultimately mean the end of the broadcast television business entirely. Perhaps that is the backstop that will keep these platforms afloat for now. Then again, perhaps the decision will be made for the networks, by leagues who see where the trends are headed.
For now, streamers like Amazon are still paying less than their linear counterparts for sports rights. But should that at any point change, it is hard to see how “New Paramount” or Fox Corporation can compete.
Broadcast television is still the biggest platform for sports television. Take the NFL’s 4:25 PM ET window and put it on Amazon, and viewership will decline considerably. But as Stephen Colbert might be able to tell you, winning the viewership battle does not mean much if the economics do not match. And based on Thursday Night Football, Amazon could attract a younger audience in that window even if the overall audience is lower.
All of which is to say that “New Paramount” has hitched its wagon to a horse that may soon break free. It is hard to say for certain whether the networks or the leagues are in the most uncertain situation, but much like late night television, sports on broadcast TV are not a long-term proposition.
In Hogan case, no heroes
Hulk Hogan’s death last week was an opportunity to look back on his lawsuit against Gawker, which ultimately resulted in the end of the sports website Deadspin (which still exists, but in no prominent form). There has been an odd reluctance in some of these retrospectives to concede that Gawker’s decision to publish intimate video of someone without their knowledge was, at best, poor judgment.
If it is true that defending free speech means protecting even the worst speech, then defending journalism must mean protecting even the worst journalism. There is a credible argument that the slippery slope from the Hogan verdict is contributing to real constraints on important reporting to this day. But it would be a mistake to pretend that Gawker was speaking truth to power in seeking to humiliate someone with surreptitious intimate video that had little if any news value.
In the “snark” era of celebrity journalism, tossed off cruelty was commonplace. (The Hogan tape fits into the same context as the Erin Andrews video that came out a few years earlier, which Deadspin publicized with a link.) If there is anything to rue about the Hogan lawsuit, it is not the demise of that era — which was overdue even by 2016 — but the litigious excess that grew in its wake.
Also passing away last week was the actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played Theo on “The Cosby Show” but has a closer sports media connection than one might think. Years ago, CBS aired a sitcom based on Tony Kornheiser’s life, which starred Jason Alexander as ‘Kornheiser’ and Warner as ‘Michael Wilbon‘. The actors even showed up in those roles in a “PTI” cold-open. The show, as with many “Seinfeld” alum vehicles at the time, did not make it past the first season.
