CBS, Byron Allen, and the business of bad television

This is going to take a while.Picking up on last week's thread, pretty much everything you've read about CBS replacing Colbert with Byron Allen's Comics Unleashed is wrong. Even by the abysmal standards of television journalism, the reporting here has been god-awful. We can say with a high degree of confidence that there is less here than meets the eye, but since none of the people who are paid good money to dig into these stories bothered to do any work, we are left to speculate about most of the finer details.The meta-story of the demise of CBS late night is just the latest fodder in our long-standing rant about coverage of the television industry, a corner of the news landscape where huge stories go unreported, demonstrably wrong conventional wisdom is allowed to stand for decades, and the most egregiously distorted corporate spin is credulously reported as fact.In this case, what has been described as a major change to the CBS lineup appears to have been nothing more than a…