Stephen Colbert's Cancellation Shows Corporate Media Will Do Anything to Appease Trump

CBS just killed the top show in late night for 'financial reasons.' (Translation: to make sure Paramount's sale goes through.)

During a taping of The Late Show Thursday, Stephen Colbert announced the show would end in May, prompting gasps from the audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater.

“Yeah, I share your feelings,” said Colbert, who had only heard the news the day before.

Colbert went on to say that he was not going to be handing over the reins to another host and that, instead, The Late Show was being canceled entirely, bringing an end not only to a franchise that launched 32 years ago by David Letterman but to late-night programming of any kind at CBS, the country’s most-watched broadcast network.

“This is all just going away,” said Colbert, who then thanked his staff and crew:

“I am extraordinarily, deeply grateful to the 200 people who work here. We get to do this show for each other every day, all day. And I've had the pleasure and the responsibility of sharing what we do every day with you in front of this camera for the last 10 years. And let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it, and it's a job that I'm looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months.”

The news prompted outrage and despair from Colbert’s fans, celebrity admirers, and even some of his late-night rivals. On Instagram, Jimmy Kimmel shared Colbert’s announcement with a message: “Love you Stephen. Fuck you and all your Sheldons CBS,” a reference to the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory and its spinoff.

It also triggered nearly instant speculation about the possible political reasons for the shocking cancellation.

In a statement issued Thursday evening and attributed to executives George Cheeks, Amy Reisenbach, and David Stapf, CBS praised Colbert as “irreplaceable” and said Colbert would “be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television.”

“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” read the statement. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

The not-so-subtle message CBS was trying to convey? “We are canceling the most-watched show in broadcast late night, whose host is a vocal Trump critic, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with Paramount’s pending sale to Skydance Media, which is awaiting approval from federal regulators loyal to the president. We swear! It’s just, you know, difficult financial headwinds or something.”

The facts, of course, tell a different story.

Though late-night audiences are not what they were a generation ago, The Late Show has been the most-watched late-night program for nearly a decade. If the financial outlook is as grim as CBS wants us to believe it is, the network could have simply cut costs, much like NBC did by scaling back The Tonight Show to four episodes a week and eliminating the Late Night band. These are the painful but considered steps a company takes when it isn’t merely capitulating to an administration hellbent on vengeance.

There is also the conspicuous matter of timing: Just two weeks ago, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a nuisance lawsuit against 60 Minutes over an interview with Kamala Harris he claimed was deceptively edited. The settlement reportedly included a side deal in which CBS agreed to air public service announcements supporting conservative causes.

Skydance is run by nepo baby David Ellison, whose father, Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, is a prominent Republican donor, Trump buddy, and 2020 election denier who backed Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

And, as Variety noted, using rather tortured language, the younger Ellison “has projected an image of being intrigued by the politics espoused by President Donald Trump, who Colbert and Stewart routinely skewer in monologues and commentary.” In other words, he’s just another MAGA-curious tech oligarch.

Three days before the show was canceled, Colbert delivered a scathing monologue about Paramount’s capitulation:

I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It's ‘big fat bribe.’ Because this all comes as Paramount owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance … and some of the TV-typers out there are blogging that once Skydance gets CBS, the new owner's desire to please Trump could put pressure on late night host and frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert.

Also this week, Colbert devoted an 11-minute segment to Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein.

Sen. Adam Schiff, who was Colbert’s guest on Thursday, posted on BlueSky: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”

Trump weighed in on Friday and did not exactly quell suspicion about the cancellation. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” he posted on Truth Social.

Given the non-stop calamities since Trump’s inauguration, from the decimation of U.S. Agency for International Development, which will likely lead to millions of deaths, to the opening of a concentration camp in the Everglades, it might feel like the fate of one late-night show doesn’t matter. But the cancellation of The Late Show for political reasons is not only the end of a cherished American comedy institution. It is also an ominous sign for democracy. If a millionaire comedian isn’t safe making fun of the president on TV, who is? The news is yet another dispiriting reminder that corporate media will do almost anything to placate the president—even self-immolation. How else can you describe a network axing one of its marquee programs, hosted by someone who, according to its own statement, belongs “in the pantheon of the greats.”

Colbert has spent almost 30 years within the corporation now known as Paramount Global. He rose to fame as a bloviating correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, then landed his own show, The Colbert Report, in which he played a caricature of the Fox News blowhards like Bill O’Reilly. He gained a reputation for merciless satire that made the powerful squirm—as with his brutal roasting of George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006.

He succeeded Letterman at The Late Show in 2015 and briefly struggled to find his voice after ditching his blustery persona. But Colbert soon surpassed both the Jimmys at 11:30 and has remained on top for nine years. On average, The Late Show gets about twice as many viewers as The Tonight Show. In fact, its audience increased modestly over last quarter—perhaps because viewers crave a voice of reason at a time of political insanity.

CBS has been walking back its late-night offerings over the past few years. When James Corden left The Late Late Show in 2023, the network killed the franchise and replaced it with After Midnight, a comedy panel show that was canceled in March.

But The Late Show remained successful by embracing serious conversations about the news. The show often welcomed guests from the worlds of politics, science, and journalism along with the usual celebrities plugging their latest movie or TV show.

Just this week, Colbert talked to Schiff about the lessons for Democrats in the New York mayoral race, and to Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, about Trump’s attacks on science. It was like watching Meet the Press—but funnier and often more informative.

Though it seems entirely possible, even likely, that Colbert will land at another network or streaming service, the cancellation will leave 200 people out of a steady job in an increasingly unstable industry.

The end of The Late Show means the further loss of tough Trump coverage on broadcast TV—which, at least technically, remains free to all. (It hardly feels like a coincidence that Colbert’s cancellation came the same day that Congress voted to cut $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which will likely decimate NPR and PBS, particularly in rural areas that rely on federal money. Daniel Tiger is another truth-teller under siege.)

Kimmel and Seth Meyers both remain on late night—for now—but their corporate overlords, Disney and Comcast, have not exactly inspired confidence in their willingness to stand up to Trump.

Comedy fans immediately began to worry about John Oliver and the fate of his show, Last Week Tonight on HBO.

More immediately, it’s not clear what will happen to Colbert’s friend and former colleague, Jon Stewart, who returned to The Daily Show in a limited capacity in February 2024 and whose deal expires in December.

In a podcast episode Thursday, Stewart said he had no idea what would happen to The Daily Show once the Skydance sale goes through. “They may sell the whole fucking place for parts.”

Stewart best summed up the current situation in 2022 when accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center—another cherished cultural institution Trump is rapidly dismantling. He said that “the fragility of leaders” posed a greater threat to comedy than supposedly woke audiences who can’t take a joke.

“When a society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first,” he continued. “It’s just a reminder to people that democracy is under threat. Authoritarians are the threat to comedy, to art, to music, to thought, to poetry, to progress, to all those things.”

Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture columnist.

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