July 21, 2025
The community claims it’s canceling The Late Present for monetary causes, however the actual backside line right here is Trump appeasement.
Stephen Colbert on the set of The Late Present final week.
(Scott Kowalchyk / CBS by way of Getty Photos)
Final Thursday, President Trump, determined for the nation to cease speaking about his shut private pal and frequent journey companion Jeffrey Epstein, bought a momentary reprieve. He scored a pair of main victories over his critics, actual and imagined, and additional reshaped the mainstream media panorama alongside the traces of his private vendettas. In Washington, Congress lastly lower federal funding for the Company for Public Broadcasting (PBS) and Nationwide Public Radio (NPR), a objective of the suitable for many years. The president’s loathing for PBS and NPR is such that he threatened to main any Republican who pushed again towards it. “Any Republican that votes to permit this monstrosity to proceed broadcasting won’t have my assist or Endorsement,” Trump announced.
To nobody’s shock, congressional Republicans did as instructed. They did so regardless that their rural constituents would be the hardest hit—individuals who rely on these stations for earthquake and flood warnings, versus the elite coastal socialists the president imagines because the community’s sole demographic. That very same day in New York, Trump bought a big bonus. The Late Present’s Stephen Colbert, Trump’s most extremely rated late-night comedy critic, was fired. Simply three days earlier, Colbert had roasted his company bosses, CBS and its mum or dad firm, Paramount. Paramount had paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed towards 60 Minutes whereas a deal for the Ellison household’s Skydance to purchase Paramount hung within the steadiness at Trump’s Federal Communications Fee (FCC). Colbert quipped, “I imagine this sort of sophisticated monetary settlement with a sitting authorities official has a technical identify in authorized circles: It’s ‘massive fats bribe!’”
Days later, Colbert bought phrase that he was getting the axe: On the finish of his current contract in Could 2026, CBS will let him go. What’s extra, community executives stated that The Late Present itself, which David Letterman based in 1993, would stop to exist. Final March, Invoice Maher, a typically harsh critic of the president, flew out to Mar-a-Lago on the behest of Child Rock to have dinner with Trump and bend the knee. Notably, Trump supporter David Zaslav’s WB Discovery properties, together with CNN, have gotten off comparatively frivolously in comparison with ABC, CBS, NPR, and PBS in Trump’s media wars. Invoice Maher nonetheless has a present. Stephen Colbert, who didn’t bend the knee, doesn’t.
We nonetheless don’t know if CBS was pressured into firing Colbert or just supplied him up as a sacrifice to appease Trump’s FCC. Regardless of the timing, and the billion-dollar stakes across the Skydance deal, CBS govt George Cheeks denied that the transfer was political and insisted that the cancellation was “purely a monetary resolution.” Taking CBS at its phrase for the second, Cheeks isn’t incorrect. Late-night discuss reveals have struggled to turn a profit for their corporate owners for years. They continue to be costly relics of a long-gone three-network broadcast world. When James Corden left The Late Late Present in 2023, which aired after Colbert’s, CBS canceled it, too. The community changed it with a rebooted, cheaply produced comedy sport present, After Midnight. Colbert’s rankings nonetheless run far forward of his two chief rivals, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and NBC’s Jimmy Fallon, however late night time’s advert revenues have steadily dropped for years. Seven years in the past, late night time cleared $439 million; final 12 months, that whole was lower in half, to $220 million. In the meantime, over at Fox Information, Greg Gutfeld’s late-night entry Gutfeld!, which matches on an hour earlier, manages aggressive numbers with nothing however 5 individuals sitting on chairs guffawing at its host’s attempts to make the word “Nazi” fun.
Whereas the monetary free fall of late night time is actual, so is the exact political timing of the Colbert resolution. CBS went to nice lengths to keep away from apologizing or admitting wrongdoing on behalf of 60 Minutes when it paid Trump his $16 million. If CBS desires to keep away from embarrassing workers who did nothing incorrect, why hearth Colbert simply days after his extensively quoted remark? By calling his firing a “purely monetary resolution,” CBS executives wish to give the impression that they have been solely following the steadiness sheets. They needed to know their timing would seem like extra groveling. They might have waited one other week. Why announce three days after Colbert attacked them and Trump? What’s the hurry?
The hurry is that Colbert referred to as the payoff “an enormous fats bribe” on Monday, and Skydance’s David Ellison met with the FCC’s Brendan Carr on Tuesday. On the assembly, an FCC filing states that Ellison and his lawyer “mentioned Skydance’s dedication to unbiased journalism and its embrace of numerous viewpoints, rules that can guarantee CBS’s editorial decision-making displays the various ideological views of American viewers.”
Present Situation
Maybe it’s simply one other unbelievable scheduling coincidence, however that promise of unbiased journalism got here days after Ellison sat down on the Allen and Co. retreat in Solar Valley for early-acquisition talks with Bari Weiss for her archconservative web site, The Free Press. Because the media business e-newsletter Puck asked: “Is it sound enterprise or simply savvy advantage signaling in a Trump 2.0 world?” One can ask the identical query about firing Colbert. With solely tea leaves to learn for now, it certain seems to be just like the Skydance media behemoth we’re about to get—with Larry Ellison, a longtime Trump supporter and Elon Musk Twitter investor hovering over it—will take a decidedly far-right tilt. And if it seems something in any respect like Ellison’s Twitter funding, it is going to even be a really ugly tilt.
If Paramount thinks caving, paying up, and Trump-focused MAGA advantage signaling will assist grease the wheels to place Skydance’s deal by means of, then Colbert’s firing produced an prompt return on funding. Trump took to Reality Social Friday morning to crow his delight about CBS’s purely monetary resolution. “I completely love that Colbert’ bought fired. His expertise was even lower than his rankings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is subsequent. Has even much less expertise than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is healthier than all of them mixed, together with the Moron on NBC who ruined the as soon as nice Tonight Present.”
CBS—lengthy identified amongst business watchers as “the Tiffany community”—has an extended historical past of silencing expertise with loud, liberal opinions. With Colbert’s firing, it was as if the community’s late founder, William S. Paley, had risen from the grave to hang-out his outdated dwelling. The perfect identified instance stays Paley’s canceling The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour not just for its anti–Vietnam Conflict and religiously themed satire but in addition for reserving leftists like Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez. However CBS’s historical past of suppressing dissident views goes again additional than that. In June 1939, one other top-rated CBS comedian, Eddie Cantor, appeared on the New York World’s Honest to handle a Hadassah assembly of 1000’s. He used the second to lash out towards the rise of home fascism and antisemitism in america after 900 Jewish refugees from Hitler on the SS St. Louis have been despatched again to Europe by our immigration authorities. “Except we’re terribly cautious, except we struggle for all times and liberty, the entire enterprise now happening over there might be transferred over right here,” Cantor said. “Some individuals instructed me I appear to be getting fairly panicky. They don’t know what essential industrialists are behind this enterprise, behind Senator Reynolds and Father Coughlin and Normal Moseley and George Deatherage. These males are the enemies of not solely the Jews however of all America.” Democratic Senator Robert Rice Reynolds got here from North Carolina, as did Cantor’s sponsor at CBS, RJR Reynolds Tobacco. Cantor misplaced his present inside two weeks.
George Clooney not too long ago performed CBS Information correspondent Edward R. Murrow for the Broadway manufacturing primarily based on his 2005 movie Good Evening, and Good Luck. After scoring a physique blow towards Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, the polarizing Murrow was exiled by Paley out of CBS’s prime-time lineup to sporadic appearances on Sunday afternoons. Clooney’s play tells the story of Murrow’s public demise as a lot as McCarthy’s.
In February 1982, the Display Actors Guild president and star of CBS’s Lou Grant, Ed Asner, appeared on the steps of the State Division in Washington, DC. Asner stood alongside actors and filmmakers Howard Hesseman, Lee Grant, Penny Marshall, Bert Schneider, and Ralph “Pa Walton” Waite. He introduced a verify for $25,000 to “Medical Help for El Salvador,” which went to the rebels who opposed the right-wing authorities backed by the Reagan administration. They hoped to boost $1 million sooner or later. A reporter requested Asner if he would assist a communist authorities in El Salvador. He stated sure, so long as that government was democratically elected. Lou Grant sponsors like Kimberly-Clark quickly pulled out of the present. CBS canceled it in Could. The corporate pointed to a drop in rankings, or a “purely a monetary resolution,” as we are saying now. Simply more unusual timing? As Asner said back then, “It permits the Jerry Falwells, the Kleenex individuals and the Caucus of Conservative customers to assume they’ll curb freedom of speech at will.”
In style
“swipe left under to view extra authors”Swipe →
And so it did, and they also nonetheless do immediately. Stephen Colbert now joins that listing. It’s uncertain that Colbert will disappear. The Late Present might not make the community all the cash it might like, however Colbert nonetheless instructions an viewers of hundreds of thousands. As the trail to the White Home goes more and more by means of podcasts and YouTubers and non-network reveals, Colbert can nonetheless stay a loud critic of Trump if he desires.
Extra from The Nation
Philly employees went out on strike—and got here again with a deal that no one appears to love.
Neglect Kennedy’s faux-populist, anti-science method. The previous FTC chair gives the actual mannequin of a really perfect HHS secretary.
With Trump and Stephen Miller cheering on ICE’s terror techniques, Jaime Alanis Garcia’s deadly fall within the raid on Glass Home Farms was the latest instance of a demise foretold.
In Sweden, abortion drugs are used to terminate pregnancies by means of 22 weeks gestation, in comparison with simply 10 weeks in america.
A dialog with the medical sociologist about her new e book, Get It Out, and the perils of contemplating abortion, hysterectomy, and gender-affirming care as separate points.
