CBS Cancels ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’: Anti-Trump Comedian’s Program Is Axed Soon After Parent Company Settles With President

CBS shocked the television world on Thursday evening when it announced it is canceling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” for what it claimed were financial reasons. The show will end in May, drawing the curtain on more than a decade of Mr. Colbert’s nightly denunciations of President Trump.Mr. Colbert broke the news to his audience Thursday during the recording of his show, saying, “Before we start the show, I want to let you know something I found out just last night.“Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending ‘The Late Show’ in May,” he said. “It’s not just the end of our show, it’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away. And I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners. I’m so grateful to the Tiffany Network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to call home.”The Late Show has been on CBS since 1993, when David Letterman, passed over for NBC’s “Tonight Show” after Johnny Carson’s retirement, defected to CBS. Mr. Colbert took over from Mr. Letterman in 2015.In a statement confirming the decision to end “The Late Show,” CBS said, “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” However, the news of the cancellation comes just more than two weeks after CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, announced that it had agreed to pay $16 million to settle Mr. Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS for the editing of Vice President Harris’s October 2024 “60 Minutes” interview. Paramount’s board reportedly felt the company had to settle the lawsuit before the Trump administration would approve its do-or-die merger with Skydance Media. Such a transaction requires the permission of the FCC. Both Paramount and the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, have officially stated that Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is unrelated to the Skydance deal. However, Mr. Carr’s FCC is currently doing a “news distortion investigation” into the editing of the Harris interview, which Mr. Trump and his supporters say was done in a way to make the vice president sound coherent.Two weeks after the settlement, the merger has yet to be approved by the FCC. Meanwhile, CBS has reportedly been in conversations with the Trump administration about ending its DEI programs. CBS was one of the most aggressive media companies when it came to DEI, imposing racial quotas on casting decisions, and committing a quarter of its development budget to buying shows from so-called Bipoc,” or “black, indigenous, people of color.” Many of these programs are now being rolled back or canceled, five years after they were introduced following the death of George Floyd.On Thursday, CBS confirmed the end of the late-night show in a statement, saying it “will end its historic run in May 2026 at the end of the broadcast season.”“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire ‘THE LATE SHOW’ franchise at that time. We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late-night television,” CBS said.CBS’s claim that the cancellation is “purely a financial decision” comes amid the speculation that Paramount (or perhaps Skydance) has quietly offered or is offering more concessions to Mr. Trump to win the government’s approval of the Skydance deal. Since he took over “The Late Show” from Mr. Letterman a decade ago, Mr. Colbert has devoted much of his nightly show to attacking Mr. Trump. Buoyed by high interest in the first Trump administration, the show’s ratings passed those of “The Tonight Show,” which was humiliating for NBC. The host of “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Fallon, was criticized for being insufficiently negative about Mr. Trump, and was ridiculed for playing with Mr. Trump’s hair when the presidential candidate appeared on “The Tonight Show” in September 2016.Mr. Trump despises Mr. Colbert. In September of last year, after watching the comedian denounce him during an appearance on PBS, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social that Mr. Colbert was “a complete and total loser,” that he was “very boring,” and that “CBS should terminate his contract.” During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Colbert advanced the narrative that Mr. Trump was a Russian asset, asking in 2019 if he was working for Russia. He has also developed unseemly nicknames for the president, such as “ol’ tater-d—.” Over the years, he has repeatedly called Mr. Trump a “disease.”The day before CBS reportedly informed Mr. Colbert that his show would be canceled, he criticized the Paramount settlement on his program, saying, “I believe this kind of complicated financial sentiment with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s ‘big fat bribe,’ because it all comes as Paramount’s owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance.”With Mr. Colbert now dispatched, close observers of CBS and Paramount are wondering who will be next. Top of mind is another reliably anti-Trump comedian on the Paramount payroll, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.” Last week, a far-left media reporter, Oliver Darcy, speculated in his “Status” newsletter that Messrs. Colbert and Stewart could soon be on the chopping block due to their anti-Trump rhetoric.“As one media insider put it to me this week, ‘What better gift could [Paramount’s new owners] give Trump than to get rid of Colbert and Stewart?’” On Thursday, before the news that “The Late Show” was being canceled hit people’s phones, Mr. Stewart said on a podcast that he didn’t know if he was going to be canceled for his anti-Trump advocacy. “They haven’t called me and said, like, ‘Don’t get too comfortable in that office, Stewart,’” he said. “But let me tell you something, I’ve been kicked out of s—ier establishments than that. We’ll land on our feet. No, I honestly don’t know.”Earlier in July, Mr. Stewart vigorously denounced his employer’s “shameful” settlement with Mr. Trump, saying, “I’m obviously not a lawyer, but I did watch ‘Goodfellas.’ … That sounds illegal.”The decision to cancel Mr. Colbert’s show will likely fuel criticism of Paramount and CBS, and further solidify a belief among left-wing scholars and journalists that the companies are trying to appease Mr. Trump to ensure the Skydance deal is approved. Mr. Trump was reportedly seeking as much as $50 million and an apology for the editing of the Harris interview, which removed a “word salad” from the beginning of the vice president’s answer to a question about Israel, making her sound more coherent. The publicly announced terms of the deal included a commitment to release transcripts of “60 Minutes” interviews with presidential candidates. However, the settlement did not come with an apology and was significantly lower than the $20 billion the president had sought. There are multiple reports — confirmed by Mr. Trump while speaking to reporters — that there is a side deal to air, once Skydance takes over, public service announcements for conservative causes, which would bring the value of the deal closer to $30 million. Paramount has denied any such deal.The chief executive of Skydance, David Ellison, is the son of the co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, a Trump supporter and the second richest man in the world. In June, Mr. Trump endorsed the younger Mr. Ellison’s takeover of Paramount.It is certainly true that there were strong financial incentives to cancel “The Late Show.” The late night daypart in broadcast television has been in major decline in the last decade, and the decline has accelerated in the last year. The shows are very expensive to produce, with an older, unionized staff, high executive salaries, and astronomical salaries for the hosts. Mr. Colbert is believed to make at least $15 million a year, likely much more. Ratings are way down, advertising revenue is shrinking, and younger consumers of comedy are watching clips from the show the next morning on YouTube — a platform that is far less profitable than broadcast television.But the drastic decision to cancel the show took the TV industry by surprise. And as the FCC has yet to approve the Skydance deal, the politics are hard to ignore. Mr. Darcy suggested last week that Paramount would have an easier time quietly ending Mr. Stewart’s show in December, when his contract is set to expire, which it could cast as a cost-cutting measure.Paramount did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.

CBS Cancels ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’: Anti-Trump Comedian’s Program Is Axed Soon After Parent Company Settles With President

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