Last week, Stephen Colbert closed out eleven years at the Ed Sullivan Theater and showed up, just 24 hours later, on Only in Monroe, the public access show out of Monroe Community Media in Michigan. It was clever, it was funny, and the internet loved it. Monroe’s team has been genuinely grateful for the attention, and the national spotlight brought real benefits to their organization at a moment when they needed it.
But there’s a story underneath the headlines worth telling.
According to Variety, the episode was financed and produced by CBS Studios and lives on Colbert’s new YouTube channel, a channel also launched and managed by CBS. The Late Show holds the copyright. That’s not a celebrity going rogue on community media. That’s a major studio production using community media’s space and spirit as a backdrop. It’s a meaningful distinction, even if the outcome was good for Monroe.
The scale difference alone is worth sitting with. Most community media centers, including Monroe, operate on annual budgets under $500,000, many on far less. Media analyst Evan Shapiro estimates The Late Show generated over $200 million in annual revenue before it was canceled. A single day of that production budget likely exceeds what many community media centers spend in a year. When corporations with that kind of resource enter our space, even generously, the question worth asking is: what does sustained investment look like, not just a one-time spotlight?
The free speech commitment is just one part of what these organizations actually do. Community media centers are often the only outlets covering local government meetings (city councils, school boards, county commissions, township trustees) creating a public record that exists nowhere else. They produce programming in languages and for communities that commercial media has never prioritized. They provide training, equipment, and a structure where editorial decisions aren’t made by corporate interests, algorithmic formulas, or anyone deciding whose voice is important enough to be heard — returning that power to the people and communities who have historically been left out of those decisions entirely. And they do all of this as genuine civic infrastructure, rooted in the places they serve, accountable to the people who live there. This is not Wayne’s World. This is the work that keeps the record.
And the free speech record itself is worth naming directly. When a resident wants to criticize their city council member on air, we put them on. When a viewpoint is unpopular locally, we provide the platform anyway. That’s not a talking point. It’s the operating principle these organizations were built on, protected by federal law and defended in practice. What makes that record particularly significant is who holds the purse strings. Community media centers have historically been funded through cable franchise fees collected from local governments — the very officials whose meetings we cover and whose decisions our residents critique on air. The pressure to self-censor has always been real and close. The willingness to stand up anyway is what defines the sector.
That record stands in contrast to what we’ve watched unfold at the corporate level. CBS canceled a profitable program — independent financial analysis suggests The Late Show was generating well over $100 million in net revenue annually — after political pressure from outside the organization. Now CBS is funding Colbert’s next production while framing it as an independent fresh start. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the pattern is familiar: large media companies managing their exposure, with speech protected only as long as it’s convenient.
Community media was built precisely for the moments when that calculus fails. The infrastructure exists in hundreds of communities across the country. The mission is real. And the funding gap is just as real —organizations doing essential civic work on budgets that would barely register as a line item for a major network.
This is why we believe cable companies, broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and internet service providers — the entities that profit most from the public’s airwaves, rights-of-way, and communications infrastructure — have a genuine public interest obligation here. Not a one-time contribution tied to a celebrity appearance. Endowments. Ongoing investment. Support for organizations like the Foundation for the Alliance for Community Media and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters that can help sustain local, independent media for the long term.
Monroe Community Media got a moment in the national spotlight, and something real came from it. Now imagine what it would mean if the industry that used that spotlight actually stayed to help hold it up.
