‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” has been the most-watched network late-night talk show for most of the last decade. This doesn’t mean nearly as much as it used to, but it was still shocking when CBS last week announced the show’s cancellation.
Colbert told a stunned studio audience last Friday that “The Late Show,” which he took over from David Letterman in 2015, would cease operations next May and that he would not be replaced.
A statement from CBS described the cancellation as “purely a financial decision.” Indeed, a nightly talk show is expensive to produce, and the format has struggled to adjust to streaming. Ad revenue across the format took a nosedive during the pandemic and mostly has not recovered.
“The Late Show” reportedly was losing tens of millions of dollars per year, and Colbert’s contract was up for renegotiation. The network said it had explored ways to cut costs, but ultimately couldn’t find a way to make the numbers work.
That is one version of the story. Colbert happens to be a relentless critic of the Trump administration, which, in his rarified position behind the host’s desk of a flagship network late-night show, has made him a prominent political voice.
Colbert turned the late-night monologue, typically a destination for reassuring centrist humor, into a nightly takedown of the ascendant MAGA movement. As Trump regained power, “The Late Show” remained essential, cathartic viewing for those of us who follow the news with mounting dread.
CBS is owned by Paramount, which is in the process of being acquired by the production company Skydance in an $8 billion merger. That sale requires approval by the Trump administration through the Federal Communications Commission.
The network also recently faced a $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump over a “60 Minutes” segment aired during last year’s campaign, in which Trump claimed the show favorably edited an interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris.
Trump’s lawsuit was widely seen as meritless, but rather than letting CBS defend its editorial practices in court, Paramount settled, leading to the departure of the newsmagazine’s longtime executive producer.
Just last week, Colbert addressed the case in a monologue: “This kind of complicated settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s ‘big fat bribe.’” He then joked, innocently, about whether the merger would prompt Paramount to censor him.
To recap: CBS’ parent company needs the administration’s approval for its merger. It chooses to settle a B.S. lawsuit in order to win Trump’s favor and not jeopardize the deal. One of the company’s key public figures questions the settlement on the air and then gets fired days later.
So yes, it was a “financial decision.” But in an industry where everything is a financial decision, that doesn’t really mean anything. The question is what kind of financial decision it was — a mundane bottom-line financial decision, or a submissiveness-toward-authoritarianism financial decision.
Either way, it was the kind of financial decision that throws talent under the bus and which underscores the subordination of journalistic principles to the corporate profit ledger — a useful, if painful reminder that most media outlets only exist because they’re making money for somebody, somewhere.
It was the sort of financial decision whose precedent will reverberate throughout the news and entertainment world, as other companies decide whether to fight frivolous lawsuits over content that hurts Trump’s feelings, or to capitulate.
It was the kind of financial decision that will chill speech even at organizations that haven’t yet been targeted, further normalizing the kind of “anticipatory obedience” that the historian Timothy Snyder identifies, in “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” as a key enabler of fascism.
It was the kind of financial decision that left Paramount and CBS with just enough plausible deniability over whether they sweetened their “big fat bribe” by silencing one of Trump’s most visible critics.
Surely everybody will get their billions. It remains to be seen what price the rest of us will pay.