The other day, a young lady got on the elevator and promptly whipped out her smartphone and began scrolling. “Excuse me,” I said, “can I ask you where you get your news?” She said, “You mean like news about what’s going on in the world?” “Yes.” “Oh, TikTok.” This reminded me of a dinner conversation I once had with economist Thomas Sowell. We discussed the overwhelming consensus among economists that the minimum wage does more damage than good. He called the minimum wage perhaps one of the most studied topics in the field. Sowell talked about a 1987 New York Times editorial with the headline, “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.” It said: “... There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market ... “An increase in the minimum wage to, say, $4.35 would restore the purchasing power of bottom-tier wages. It would also permit a minimum-wage breadwinner to earn almost enough to keep a family of three above the official poverty line. There are catches, however. It would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.” Now, The New York Times has since reversed its position. But Economics 101 has not been repealed. “Given this consensus,” I asked Sowell, “why does the minimum wage remain so popular even among some Republican politicians? Why haven’t you economists won this argument?” He said, “Because many people, especially on the left, have never heard the arguments against the minimum wage. They get their information from TV news, and they’re not interested in the downside of the minimum wage.”      This conversation about this “ignorance bubble” took place about 25 years ago. Today, most people no longer get their news from the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC. News aggregators like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, TikTok and YouTube now serve as primary news conveyors and deliver the news feeds that pop up on smartphones. As aggregators, they select stories from news outlets and serve them to consumers based on what the platforms think users want to see. This means the aggregators increasingly prioritize stories that reinforce a user’s preexisting worldview. Their goal is to keep the user glued to the phone. The best way to do this is to tell people what they want to hear and give “news” that confirms what they already believe. And that’s the problem: People increasingly consume information that confirms their beliefs instead of challenging them. All Sides is a company that measures media bias, whether from the left or the right. This is from a recent analysis: “AllSides conducted news aggregator bias analyses in late 2025. Among the most biased remain Google News and Apple News — in 2025, Google News (Lean Left) curated 73% of articles from outlets with a bias on the left and just 1% of articles from outlets on the right. Apple News (Lean Left) curated 50% from the left and just 2% from the right. “Most news aggregators curate primarily from media outlets with an AllSides Media Bias Rating of Lean Left or Left. Our 2025 analyses found that most curate less than 10% of articles from news outlets rated Lean Right or Right. Aggregators tend to source from legacy media outlets that Americans and expert bias reviewers on average rate Lean Left or Left, like CNN (Lean Left), AP (Left bias), and The New York Times (Lean Left).” Take one narrative pushed by the likes of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani: “The rich don’t pay their fair share in taxes.” In fact, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 75 percent of all federal income taxes. The top one percent pay over 40 percent while earning roughly 20 percent of the nation’s income. These numbers certainly undermine the narrative that “the rich don’t pay their fair share.” Indeed, based on their share of the nation’s income versus their share of federal taxes paid, one could argue that the rich are overtaxed. Large numbers of Americans do not know this. If the news aggregators have anything to say about it, many Americans never will. Larry Elder is a bestselling author and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an “Elderado,” visit www.LarryElder.com. Follow Larry on X @larryelder. 

Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live concluded with Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che hitting all the usual beats, including people loathing Vice President JD Vance so much that they want him or themselves dead, suggesting the country is racist, and Jeffrey Epstein. Earlier in the season, Jost raised the possibility of Second Lady Usha Vance killing herself to get away from JD, but this time Jost claimed that President Trump wants Vance himself dead, “According to a senior official, President Trump keeps a letter in the Resolute Desk addressed to Vice President JD Vance in the event he dies or is assassinated. The letter reads simply, ‘I wish it had been you.’”   SNL's season finale included the usual bits, including some JD Vance-death bits from Colin Jost, "According to a senior official, President Trump keeps a letter in the Resolute Desk addressed to Vice President JD Vance in the event he dies or is assassinated. The letter reads… pic.twitter.com/YbzfPHNKbA — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) May 19, 2026   Recently, Che suggested the Supreme Court had turned the clock back to the days of segregation and that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because she is a black woman. Now, he lamented that Uncle Sam won’t give him reparations, “President Trump has rejected Iran's latest demands to end the war, including recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and U.S. war reparations. You want reparations from America? Get in line, honey.” Like the other late night comedy shows, SNL loves some Trump-Epstein jokes. The show has accused Trump of starting the war with Iran to distract from the Epstein files, and on Saturday’s show, David Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump character asked Epstein’s ghost (Will Ferrell) what heaven is like. When Weekend Update rolled around, Jost quipped, “Texas Senator John Cornyn has introduced legislation to rename a state highway ‘Trump Interstate’ because for some reason people associate Trump with traffic across state lines.”  Routines like that are how Jost and Che ended up telling 91 percent of their political jokes about conservatives throughout the whole season, but that does not necessarily convey how nasty Weekend Update can be. SNL may be seen as an American institution, but from an unhealthy obsession with deaths in the Second Family to unfounded allegations of racism, SNL is just another outpost of late night liberalism. Here is a transcript for the May 16 show: NBC Saturday Night Live 5/17/2026 12:18 AM ET COLIN JOST: According to a senior official, President Trump keeps a letter in the Resolute Desk addressed to Vice President JD Vance in the event he dies or is assassinated. The letter reads simply, "I wish it had been you." MICHAEL CHE: President Trump has rejected Iran's latest demands to end the war, including recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz and U.S. war reparations. You want reparations from America? Get in line, honey. JOST: Texas Senator John Cornyn has introduced legislation to rename a state highway “Trump Interstate” because for some reason people associate Trump with traffic across state lines. 

The end is nigh for late-night shows where venomous hosts try to pass off political hate speech as entertainment, President Donald Trump declared Friday after Stephen Colbert aired the last episode of The Late Show on CBS. “Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS was the ‘Beginning of the End’ for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts,” Trump predicted in a TruthSocial.com post: “Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” For years, Colbert has consistently abandoned humor in order to use his show’s platform to launch vicious personal and political attacks against Trump. As of Thursday, CBS has canceled Colbert’s late-night program, purportedly for financial reasons. “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person,” Trump wrote in a separate post, adding that “You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk.” “Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” the president concluded. A new poll adds credence to Trump’s prediction about the fate of today’s crop of hateful, agenda-driven late-night hosts such as Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who was suspended last September for making false and malicious comments on his show regarding the assassination of conservative Charlie Kirk. In a national survey conducted May 15-18, 2026, The Economist/YouGov asked U.S. adult citizens who they thought was “the best late-night comedian on TV.” Fully 38% chose “None of the above” – three times the number who selected any of the top-rated hosts on NBC (Jimmy Fallon), CBS (Stephen Colbert), ABC (Jimmy Kimmel) and Fox News Channel (Greg Gutfeld), all of whom ended up in a virtual tie, garnering 11%-13% of the vote. Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart (8%) and HBO’s John Oliver (5%) drew single-digit percentages of the vote for best late-night comedian.  The popularity of “none” is emblematic of the long-term trend of viewers losing interest in late-night shows. Taken together, late-night talk shows have not been profitable since 2022, with losses steadily increasing each year.

Stephen Colbert was well into his farewell media tour when he told GQ, “I think I'm more conservative than people think.” However, according to an aggregation of previous NewsBusters studies and quote packages, that is far from true. Since NewsBusters began counting jokes in January 2023, 87 percent of Colbert's political jokes have targeted conservatives. Likewise, since September 2022, more than 99 percent of his political guests have been liberals. MRC President David Bozell said in a statement, “Good riddance to Colbert’s nightly group therapy session for progressive elitists who could not understand why half the country kept rejecting their worldview.”   "Republicans can eat a d**k." Good riddance! This clown is officially off the air! pic.twitter.com/pf1PCnbHHp — Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 22, 2026   Jokes Over the span of the final 458 Late Show episodes on CBS since January of 2023, NewsBusters logged 8,553 political jokes. Of these, Colbert told 7,480 (87 percent) about conservatives, 934 (11 percent) about liberals, and 139 (2 percent) about nonpartisan people or organizations. Colbert’s top ten most joked about people included only one Democrat. The top ten were Donald Trump (3,640), Joe Biden (339), George Santos (269), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a Republican (208), Republicans (180), JD Vance (151), Pete Hegseth (146), Elon Musk (143), Kristi Noem (106), and Rudy Giuliani (104).  NewsBusters analysts started identifying RFK Jr. as a Republican in 2024 after he endorsed Trump and was selected to be secretary of Health and Human Services. After,Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams and 2024 vice presidential nominee Tim Walz were the next Democrats on the list in a tie for 24th place with former Vice President Mike Pence at 40 total jokes. Former Vice President Kamala Harris tied for 41st place with 21 total jokes. It was not just current and former presidents and vice presidents. There are also wide discrepancies in how Colbert joked about other analogous liberal and conservative targets. Republicans (180) vs. Democrats (31) Conservatives (30) vs. Liberals (8) Fox News (73) and Newsmax (2) vs. CNN (4) and MSNBC/MS NOW (1) Mike Johnson (87) and Kevin McCarthy (76) vs. Nancy Pelosi (6) and Hakeem Jeffries (3) Melania Trump (100) vs. Jill Biden (2) Eric Trump (84) and Donald Trump Jr. (56) vs. Hunter Biden (4) Clarence Thomas (30), Samuel Alito (29), the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc (7), Brett Kavanaugh (5), John Roberts (1), Neil Gorsuch (1), Amy Coney Barrett (1) vs. Elena Kagan (1), Sonia Sotomayor (0), and Ketanji Brown Jackson (0), and the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc (0). Then there's the attitude. Colbert’s jokes about Republicans tended to be harsher than his ones about Democrats such as when he celebrated Trump being indicted, “Here in New York it was 40 degrees, but I still ate ice cream out of a baseball helmet. Why? Oh, just a little something worth celebrating today because literally three minutes before I walked out on this stage here, the New York Times reported a New York grand jury voted to indict former President Donald J. Trump. Oh! Oh! Come on! Come on! Thank you! Ladies and gentlemen! It’s right, he was-- ladies and gentlemen, he was right, we're finally saying Merry Christmas again.”  He could also throw around a Nazi analogy as easily as any MS NOW host, “Yes, do not compare ICE or Border Patrol agents to the Nazis. That’s an unfair comparison. The Nazis were willing to show their faces.” Colbert never celebrated any Democratic arrests by eating ice cream out of a baseball helmet or ever compared a Biden policy to the Nazis.     Guests Over the 511 Late Show episodes NewsBusters monitored for its guest count studies since November 2022, Colbert invited both the most and the highest percentage of liberal guests compared to other hosts. The final count came in at 263 liberals and one conservative, or more than 99 percent.  NewsBusters analysts classified a guest as liberal or conservative based off of what they told Colbert, their most recent job, or recent voting history, not necessarily how they self-identify. Therefore, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s four appearances and former Sen. Jeff Flake’s one appearance are counted as liberal appearances despite them being Republicans when they were in Congress. However, former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney still managed to make broadly conservative points in her December 2023 appearance, so she is listed as the lone Republican in this study, even if most conservatives would not want to claim her. A political guest was defined as any current or former elected politician, administration official, journalist, activist, or celebrity who talked about politics. Colbert had so many liberal guests since November 2022 that he formed a top ten most common guest list as well. That list featured John Oliver (10), John Dickerson (8), Anderson Cooper (8), Elizabeth Warren (6), Bernie Sanders (5), Pete Buttigieg (5), Jon Stewart (5), Adam Kinzinger (4), Jen Psaki (4), Rachel Maddow (4), Chris Hayes, and Seth Meyers (4). In total, Colbert had 50 political guests appear at least twice, and 20 appear at least three times. Democrats loved appearing with Colbert because it was a change for them to communicate directly with other liberals and help them get out the vote. For instance, Harris dropped by during the 2024 election to share a beer with Colbert, who gushed, “So, cheers, there you go. Ooh. Tastes like the beautiful city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” A month later, he urged Walz to give viewers a pep talk, “So, let’s bring it in, coach, for one final pep talk to the voters out there maybe haven’t made up their mind and if you can give that pep talk using as many of these sports clichés as possible, that would be great.” ***** Colbert’s fans lamented his downfall by claiming he was a man who spoke truth to power. They cited his battles with Trump, and before that, with George W. Bush. As different as the two presidents can be, the one thing they have in common is that they are both Republicans, and nobody ever praised Colbert for speaking truth to power when it came to Barack Obama or Joe Biden.

Stephen Colbert began the final episode of CBS’s The Late Show by unwittingly highlighting how it all went wrong. Colbert told the audience that he viewed his show as “the joy machine” and that he thought his job was to “feel the news with you,” even if it was not actually that joyful. Later, during a sci-fi skit about the show being sucked into a black hole, Colbert was joined once again by his fellow late night hosts who suggested the black whole—that was actually green—was President Trump. Colbert began the show by declaring, “Folks, we have done over 1,800 of these shows, and most nights I come out here and I talk to the audience beforehand, and tonight I thought I'd talk to the audience in here and the audience out there at home. This show, I want you to know and you to know, has been a joy for us to do for you. In fact, we call this show the joy machine, all right?…We call it the joy machine because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine.”   Stephen Colbert opened up his show by playing his pre-show address to the audience, "Now, on night one of The Colbert Report, back in the day, I said anyone can read the news at you, I promise to feel the news at you. And I realized pretty soon in this job that our job over here… pic.twitter.com/1MGsgpxQuc — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) May 22, 2026   While The Late Show was not joyful to those who were on the receiving end of Colbert’s profane rantings, Colbert insisted that “On night one of The Colbert Report, back in the day, I said anyone can read the news to you, I promise to feel the news at you. And I realized pretty soon in this job that our job over here was different. We were here to feel the news with you.” That was not Colbert’s job. To say a comedian’s job is to be funny is not particularly insightful because it says nothing about how to be funny. Yet, it is still more helpful than saying a comedian’s job is to help people process their political feelings. Today, comedy-seeking consumers don’t need to rely on the broadcast networks like they once did and Colbert’s desire to turn The Late Show into Liberal Therapy Hour contributed to the show’s demise. The word “Trump” was never mentioned during Colbert’s finale, but he was alluded to. During the sketch about the show’s impending boom of being sucked into the void, The Daily Show’s Monday host and Colbert’s former colleague at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, showed up on behalf of Paramount to rebuke him, “I'm here on behalf of Paramount. They wanted me to read the statement. I kind have to do what they say. I'm not the one who got canceled for stealing printer cartridges.” He then read, “Paramount strongly believes in covering both sides of any black hole that is swallowing everything we know and love, and the coverage must also include the positive aspects of the insatiable emptiness.”   Later, during a skit about the show being sucked into a black hole, Jon Stewart showed up to say "I'm here on behalf of Paramount through they wanted me to read the statement. I kind have to do what they say. I'm not the one who got canceled for stealing printer… pic.twitter.com/20Abg6nTJi — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) May 22, 2026   Stewart’s own show is proof that is not true, but the Trump-black whole metaphors were not quite done. Later, the Strike Force Five cast reunited again, and Colbert asked, “But why aren't you guys being pulled in too?” Jimmy Kimmel retorted that, “You know what, actually, one of these holes opened at my show last year, but it went away after about three days.” After Colbert wondered, “Is that what's gonna happen to me too?” John Oliver claimed, “At some point, this may come for all of our shows. But Stephen, what's important to remember is tonight it is gonna eat you.”   Jimmy Kimmel also suggests the green black hole represents Trump, "You know what, actually, one of these holes opened at my show last year, but it went away about three days." pic.twitter.com/dpa8E8q6ZC — Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) May 22, 2026   All TV shows eventually get sucked into the black hole, but Colbert accelerated his own downfall because his real black hole was the combination of the nature of television in 2026 and poor comedic choices.  Here is a transcript for the May 21 show: CBS The Late Show with Stephen Colbert 5/21/2026 11:35 PM ET STEPHEN COLBERT: Folks, we have done over 1,800 of these shows, and most nights I come out here and I talk to the audience beforehand and tonight I thought I'd talk to the audience in here and the audience out there at home. This show, I want you to know and you to know, has been a joy for us to do for you. In fact, we call this show the joy machine, all right? Louis stole it from us and we are currently in litigation right now. You better lawyer up, buddy. We call it the joy machine because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine. LOUIS CATO: Yeah. COLBERT: But the thing is, if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn't hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears. And I cannot adequately explain to you what the people who work here have done for each other and how much we mean to each other. CATO: Yeah. COLBERT: So, I will just say—I would just say to them, I would just say to them: you are all the great Achilles whom we knew. Now, on night one of The Colbert Report, back in the day, I said anyone can read the news to you, I promise to feel the news at you. And I realized pretty soon in this job that our job over here was different. We were here to feel the news with you. And I don't know about you, but I sure have felt it. And I just want to let all y'all know in here and out there how important you've been to what we have done. The energy that you have given us, we sincerely need that to have done the best possible show we could have for you for the last 11 years. … COLBERT: This can’t be happening. If only I had some sort of wise mentor figure I could talk to. Jon Stewart! Oh, Jon. Jon, do you know any wise mentor figures I could talk to? JON STEWART: No, actually, Stephen, I'm here on behalf of Paramount. They wanted me to read the statement. I kind have to do what they say. I'm not the one who got canceled for stealing printer cartridges. COLBERT: That's not why I was canceled! STEWART: Quote, “Paramount strongly believes in covering both sides of any black hole that is swallowing everything we know and love, and the coverage must also include the positive aspects of the insatiable emptiness.” COLBERT: Stephen: You know what? That's fair. STEWART: It is.  ... COLBERT: But why aren't you guys being pulled in too? JIMMY KIMMEL: You know what, actually, one of these holes opened at my show last year, but it went away after about three days. COLBERT: Is that what's gonna happen to me too? ALL: Shhhhhh. JOHN OLIVER: At some point, this may come for all of our shows. But Stephen, what's important to remember is tonight it is gonna eat you.