"Didn't air" doesn't mean what you think it means. It means the interview didn't go over the airwaves via broadcast towers. The full interview is online, which thanks to the Streisand effect already has millions of views and therfore helped CBS in terms of funding. This can be seen as a 4D chess move by CBS. They'll certainly do this again if they're hitting millions of views.
The youtube video currently has ~1.4 million views. Colbert averages 2 to 3 million television viewers per night, plus some number of youtube views that I haven't looked up the stats for.
That is, this interview has been seen by fewer people than it would have, had it been on television.
3.1 million views as the sun goes down here in Tennessee. I'll concede that's not significantly "surpass" but it's still approximately equal, and may have been more people than saw the actual broadcast.
It isn't. CBS is owned by the Ellisons, who are big Trump supporters. They are absolutely complicit in attempts to quash dissenting voices.
You're right that the Streisand effect is in play here, but it's not 4D chess. It's garden-variety incompetence, because the policy makers in the government are too old to see anything other than broadcast TV as the most valuable medium.
Comedians have a knack for succinctly expressing the truth:
> "Let's just call this what it is: Donald Trump's administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV because all Trump does is watch TV," Colbert joked.
Technically doesn't Trump also spend a lot of time golfing, and attending events where people praise Trump - admittedly for broadcast on TV but not necessarily while watching TV?
I see that it's become harder to track because the White House doesn't disclose what he's doing as much, but yeah, lots of golf still.
Sure, jokes are often technically incorrect while performing a directionally-correct summation of the truth of the matter.
But also, the few times I've been unfortunate enough to have to go to mega golf venues, the clubhouses generally have TVs prominently all over the place. So there is quite the demographic overlap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A