Curse Not the King

Friday, 18 July 2025

Why CBS’s Cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Stinks to High Hell

Even back in the now-comparatively-sane Trump 1.0 administration, it seemed palpably true to me that the best check against Trump’s authoritarian instincts wasn’t legal or Constitutional, but rather cultural. The culture of free speech, of being able to criticize — in no uncertain terms, with no held punches — anyone in authority is fundamental to the American mindset. It’s like the opening of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College:

Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

In the way that fish take water for granted, Americans take true freedom of speech and freedom of the press for granted. It’s the culture we were born into, the air we breathe. And to my mind, the fiercest and most effective form of criticism — especially political — is mockery. Mark Twain, America’s first great (and perhaps still greatest) humorist, said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”

No one in Russian media mocks Vladimir Putin, lest they find themselves falling out one of Russia’s easily-fallen-out-of windows. No one in Chinese media mocks Xi Jinping. Back in 2017 the CCP went as far as to censor images of Winnie the Pooh, because Xi resembles Pooh so clearly, and people naturally find that amusing. Trump, clearly, has authoritarian instincts and desires, but US media — print, web, podcasts, YouTube, social, and TV — has been replete with unrelenting mockery aimed at him. There’s no better example of that than late night talk shows: Colbert on CBS, Jimmy Kimmel on ABC, Seth Meyers on NBC, Jon Stewart and his fellow hosts on The Daily Show at Comedy Central, John Oliver and Bill Maher on HBO. Vociferous, unrelenting critics of Trump, all of them. (And it works both ways: Greg Gutfield’s Gutfield! is a ratings success at 10:00pm for Fox News.)

That’s been one of the canaries I’ve been monitoring in the Trump 2.0 drift-into-authoritarianism coal mine. So long as Trump is getting skewered by comedians on major TV channels nightly, in some sense, we’re doing OK.

But while our Constitution and cultural fabric protect our media from government interference, there’s no such protection from ownership interference. Trump can’t dictate what a newspaper prints — proven again, just last night, by The Wall Street Journal, which added significant fuel to the Epstein fire that’s rupturing MAGAland with a scoop on a dirty birthday letter Trump wrote to his friend Epstein in 2003, despite Trump trying to quash the story by directly calling Journal owner Rupert Murdoch. Trump can’t dictate who hosts late-night TV shows or censor the jokes they tell, and we still seem far from a world where Jimmy Kimmel might mysteriously “fall” from a high window.

But the owners, they can do what they want. Jeff Bezos kiboshed The Washington Post’s already-written endorsement of Kamala Harris — on the cusp of the election — and torched the paper’s previously sterling reputation of independence and journalistic integrity. Patrick Soon-Shiong has done similar to the LA Times.

CBS is owned by Paramount, and Paramount is controlled by Shari Redstone. Redstone has a deal to sell Paramount to Skydance, a company controlled by David Ellison (son of Oracle gazillionaire Larry Ellison) for $8 billion, but the deal needs approval from the FCC, and the FCC answers to Trump. That’s why CBS settled a bullshit lawsuit by Trump against 60 Minutes for $16 million. As former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft told Jon Stewart (righteously, on Paramount-owned Comedy Central) regarding the “settlement”: “They never said, ‘We screwed up.’ They just paid the money. It was a shakedown, that’s what I call it. Some people call it extortion, that’s a legal term.”

The New York Post reported two weeks ago that the official settlement is only half the deal, however:

Shari Redstone’s Paramount received an unusual assist to settle its controversial lawsuit with President Trump, which should now clear the way for its long-awaited sale to independent studio Skydance, On The Money has learned.

Skydance boss David Ellison, the son of Trump friend and billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, stepped up and agreed that once he takes control of the Tiffany Network, currently part of Redstone’s flailing media empire, it will run between $15 million and $20 million of public service ads to promote causes supported by the president, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said.

“There is an anticipation of a mid-eight-figure sum that will be allocated by the network to PSA advertisements and other broadcast transmissions that support conservative causes supported by President Trump,” the source said.

It made no sense journalistically or financially for CBS to settle Trump’s lawsuit. 60 Minutes clearly did nothing ethically wrong, let alone illegal, with its editing of Kamala Harris’s interview.¹ It only makes sense as a de facto payoff to Trump to help secure approval of Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount. Likewise with CBS’s decision not just to part ways with Colbert as host, but to cease production of The Late Show entirely. It makes no TV sense. The Late Show isn’t just doing OK in the ratings, it’s the top show in the 11:30 timeslot. Here’s Jed Rosenzweig, writing for LateNighter just four days ago:

As the second quarter of 2025 wrapped, late-night’s pecking order held mostly steady — with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert topping the 11:35 PM hour in total viewers, and Late Night with Seth Meyers leading at 12:37 AM across both key ratings metrics.

CBS’s Late Show was the only show among the nine tracked by LateNighter to draw more total viewers in Q2 than it had in the first quarter of 2025 — although just barely, with the show growing its audience by 1% quarter over quarter. All told, the Stephen Colbert-hosted show averaged 2.42 million viewers across 41 first-run episodes, comfortably outpacing ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live (1.77 million) and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (1.19 million). In the advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo, however, Kimmel surged ahead with 220,000 viewers — his strongest performance in a year — edging out Colbert (219,000) and leaving Fallon (at 157,000) in a distant third.

At 12:37 AM, Late Night With Seth Meyers continued its quiet reign. The NBC mainstay averaged 900,000 total viewers and 111,000 in the demo across 35 episodes — easily topping both metrics in the late-late slot. ABC’s Nightline held second place with 810,000 total viewers and 108,000 in the demo, putting it ahead of CBS’s After Midnight, which ended its two-year run in early June with an average of 591,000 total viewers and 89,000 in the 18–49 demo.

So Colbert’s Late Show is the highest-rated overall, and effectively tied with Kimmel in the advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo.² Like all of traditional TV, late night viewership — and thus revenue — isn’t what it used to be. (For context, through the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, Letterman and Leno each drew around 4–6 million viewers per night. Johnny Carson averaged over 10 million viewers per night in the 1970s and 80s.) CBS declaring in its announcement that “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” is obvious bullshit — and, in light of its timing, extra stinky bullshit at that. Surely the top-rated show in late night isn’t just at least profitable, but almost certainly more profitable than whatever CBS might replace it with in that time slot. (CBS sources suddenly claim The Late Show lost $40 million last year; Bill Carter isn’t buying that and neither should you.)

The TV industry has always been obsessed with ratings and obsessed with advertising revenue. I can’t recall the top-rated show in any category being cancelled. Again, it makes no TV sense. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. Back in December, regarding the Bezos-driven upheaval at The Washington Post, I wrote a piece titled “Journalism Requires Owners Committed to the Cause”, which title sort of says it all. The only proper way to run a serious newspaper is for the work and reputation of the newspaper itself to the topmost priority of everyone in leadership, right up to the owner. That’s just clearly not true for Bezos. And part of it too is that the entire business of The Washington Post just doesn’t matter to Bezos. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of around $230 billion. He bought the Post from its longtime owners, the Graham family (who were owners committed to the cause) in 2013 for just $250 million. Financially, the entire Washington Post Company represents like one-thousandth of Bezos’s wealth. Trashing the paper’s reputation and the trust of its readers meant less to him than cozying up to Trump for potential trade policy favors for Amazon and rocketry deals for Blue Origin.

It’s exactly the same for David Ellison. His father, Larry Ellison, is even wealthier than Bezos, with Forbes estimating his worth above $250 billion after recent Oracle stock price gains. In normal times, with a normal US president (that is to say, not crooked), and a normal incoming buyer of a major television network (that is to say, concerned with ratings and ad revenue) it would be insane for the network to cancel the top-rated late night show just before the deal is finalized. But David Ellison doesn’t give a shit how much money CBS makes at 11:30 and doesn’t care about the three-decade legacy of The Late Show or the storied history of the theater in which it’s produced each night. Cancelling this particular hit show isn’t poison to the deal for Skydance to buy Paramount — it’s a sweetener. I missed this at the time, but Oliver Darcy, media reporter extraordinaire, called it at Status (paywalled, alas) just over a week ago:

Jon Stewart opened Monday’s episode of The Daily Show not mincing words, calling Paramount’s settlement with Donald Trump “shameful.” Just as he was digging in, a fake Arby’s ad suddenly appeared on screen, as if to cut him off mid-rant for criticizing Comedy Central’s parent company. “Did they? Son of a bitch!” Stewart exclaimed, playing along with the bit — yet nodding to a deeper fear that his commentary might soon be silenced amid all the corporate upheaval.

Later in the episode, Stewart continued to needle Paramount, sitting down with former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft for a candid and unsparing conversation. Kroft described the settlement in clear terms: “It was a shakedown.” Inside “The Daily Show,” I’m told staffers have taken pride that Stewart showed once again he is willing to stand up to powerful interests, even if it potentially risks his future employment. And while they may not yet know it, inside certain power circles, there is an open question: How much longer will Stewart have this platform?

Indeed, the reality is that the ground under not only Stewart, but also Stephen Colbert, is shifting fast. Skydance, led by Larry and David Ellison, now believes its merger with Paramount will close in the next several weeks, I’m told. Much of the attention has focused on how the Ellisons will reshape 60 Minutes and CBS News. We first reported that David Ellison met with Bari Weiss about a possible role at CBS News, and it is clear the Ellisons want to rid the network of what they see as a liberal taint. But little has been said about the futures of Colbert and Stewart, who have been two of Trump’s most consistent comedic antagonists, under the new corporate leadership. [...]

As one media insider put it to me this week, “What better gift could [the Ellisons] give Trump than to get rid of Colbert and Stewart?”

The first shoe dropped at CBS last night. TV-wise, it’d be crazy for Paramount to drop Jon Stewart too. But dropping Colbert is even crazier, and they already did that. It’s not tyranny or the threat of state violence that is taking The Late Show With Stephen Colbert off the air, but rather oligarchy and unchecked cronyism and corruption. The breathtaking abdication we’re seeing at CBS — first news with 60 Minutes, now commentary and humor with The Late Show — are signs of a decidedly American descent into curse-not-the-king mass media acquiescence to Trump’s authoritarian hostility to criticism and dissent.

Postscript

Here’s Trump on his blog this morning, heralding the news with his usual grace, equanimity, and factual accuracy:

I absolutely love that Colbert’ [sic] got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.

I will admit that it’s kind of funny that he didn’t even deign to address Fallon by name, especially since Fallon is the one who did the most to normalize Trump’s aberrant candidacy in 2016.