CBS cancels Colbert as media continues to turn Trumpward
It's not just bending the knee. It's also oligarchic solidarity.
📚 📺 📚 With corporate outlets like CBS obeying in advance, supporting independent political media is more important right now than ever. Public Notice is possible thanks to paid subscribers. If you aren’t one already, please click the button below and become one to support our work. 📚 📺 📚
Last Friday, CBS announced the The Late Show will be cancelled when host Stephen Cobert’s contract expires next May. Colbert has been one of President Donald Trump’s most pointed and persistent critics, and many believe his criticism may have led the spineless suit-sacks at the network to force the comedian out.
The Writer’s Guild of America, for example, issued a statement calling for an investigation into the cancellation.
“Cancelations are part of the business,” the WGA wrote, “but a corporation terminating a show in bad faith due to explicit or implicit political pressure is dangerous and unacceptable in a democratic society.”
Trump quickly made it clear that he did in fact want Colbert gone. As is his wont, he rushed to Truth Social to post a celebratory screed.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired!” he bloviated. “His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear [rival comedy host] Jimmy Kimmel is next.” Trump then praised Fox host Greg Gutfeld, whose latest comedy bit was urging conservatives to “reclaim” the word “Nazi.”
It's certainly very plausible that Paramount/CBS jettisoned Colbert to curry favor with the president. There’s also, though, a bleaker possibility. Execs at CBS’s parent company Paramount may have dumped Colbert not to appease Trump, but to join with him. There’s ample evidence that billionaires genuinely, sincerely like Trump’s vision of authoritarian rule by billionaire, and want to do their part to crush dissent and discipline the proles. As political organizer Max Berger argued on Bluesky, “It’s not censorship, it’s pro-regime oligarchy.”
Paramount against Colbert
Paramount insists that the decision to shutter The Late Show was financial, not political. Colbert has led the 11:35pm time slot, and is arguably the most successful late night host of our era. But dominating late night in our era means much less than it used to. Competition from digital and streaming has led to ad revenue cratering. CBS’s late night shows generated $439 million in ads in 2018; that fell by almost half, to $220 million by 2024. Colbert’s show has been losing some $40 million a year, according to Reuters.
Paramounts’ claim that it is not influenced by political considerations would be more convincing, though, if it had not already made it very clear that it is eager to kowtow to, and outright bribe, Trump.
The Federal Communications Commission is in a position to block Paramount’s $8 billion sale to Hollywood studio Skydance. It is widely believed that Trump has used that as leverage to pressure CBS. Specifically, Trump claimed (ridiculously) that CBS edited an interview with Kamala Harris in order to boost her electoral chances. He sued CBS for $10 billion.
Rather than fighting the suit and protecting its right to free speech, CBS rushed to settle, paying Trump $16 million. Many commenters and analysts pointed out that this was a disgusting acquiescence to authoritarianism. Among the harsher critics was Colbert himself; on his show last week he said that the settlement had a “technical name in legal circles: it’s ‘big fat bribe.”
Three days later, CBS announced that they were canceling his show.
Perhaps that’s just a coincidence. Or perhaps it was more along the lines of a tipping point. CBS may have been on the fence about whether or not to cut Cobert’s show or rework it. Colbert criticized them, and maybe they decided that, given lackluster revenue, it was time to prevent him from doing so again.
In other words, it’s possible that CBS canned Colbert because he criticized Trump. It’s also possible that they canned Colbert because he criticized Paramount. And it’s also possible that Paramount execs see criticism of Trump and criticism of Paramount as one and the same, and want to silence both, not because Trump is forcing them, but because they affirmatively like Trump and what he stands for.
The last possibility seems especially plausible when you realize that Skydance Media is the company of David Ellison, son of multi-billionaire and Trump supporter Larry Ellison. The Ellisons are reportedly in talks to try to partner with Bari Weiss’s left-hating media enterprise The Free Press. That signals a sharp rightward turn at CBS in line with the preferences of both Trump and Trump enthusiast Larry Ellison.
Media oligarchs against free speech
Billionaire media oligarchs in general don’t care about free speech — they care about making money. And many of them have clearly decided that multi-million dollar bribes and abandoning any form of journalistic integrity are a small price to pay for gutting regulatory oversight and lower taxes.
Former President Joe Biden’s administration was less friendly to corporations than any in the last fifty years. He amped up regulatory oversight and directly confronted many of the billionaires who became open or tacit Trump supporters.
For example, the Biden White House investigated billionaire Elon Musk for violating labor law at his car company Tesla, for destroying habitats with his exploding rockets at SpaceX, and for a slew of other violations — all of which probably factored into Musk’s decision to back Trump. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Biden administration had a contentious public feud after Biden tweeted that raising corporate taxes could reduce inflation — arguably a prelude to Bezos’s decision to prevent the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris.
A note from Aaron: Enjoying this piece from Noah? Then please sign up to support our work 📈 Paid subscribers keep PN free for everyone 📈
And as an even more relevant data point, Biden’s antitrust division effectively derailed Paramount’s merger plans with Apollo Global Management and Sony in 2024. For the Ellisons and other oligarchs, Trump’s boorish demands for political allegiance and millions in cash payments have to be balanced against public interest regulations which cost corporate overlords not millions, but billions.
In that sense, payouts to Trump, and flattering Trump, are just business. But the idea that bribery is a legitimate part of doing business is itself a political stance. So is the idea that regulatory oversight is a gross imposition on corporate overlords. So is the de facto belief that the ultra rich shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
When CBS, or ABC, or other outlets bend the knee to Trump, they’re often accused of — well, bending the knee. In January, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes created the iconic form of this criticism in a cartoon for the Washington Post which showed Bezos, Disney, and other billionaires kneeling before a huge Trump idol, offering it giant bags of cash.
This cartoon clearly struck a nerve — Bezos’s Post, in one among many cowardly developments, refused to print it, and Telnaes resigned on principle and in disgust. Yet, the general billionaire enthusiasm for Trump suggests that we may be looking, not at craven fealty, but at a kind of calculated, enthusiastic oligarchic solidarity.
Trump definitely enjoys it when those around him engage in ritual acts of humiliation. But Bezos or the Ellisons or ABC don’t necessarily see formal apologizes, or million-dollar payments, or abandoning free speech, as humiliation — not compared to paying taxes or dealing with government regulators, anyway. Palliating Trump is really just palliating themselves, since Trump stands for the inalienable truth that rich white guys should be allowed to do whatever they want without any accountability whatsoever.
Colbert does not believe in that inalienable truth, which is why Trump hates him and wants him gone. We can’t know for sure if Colbert’s bosses want him gone for the same reason. But it’s easy to connect the dots.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s newsletter, please do your part to keep Public Notice free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Colbert still has a few months on his contract, right? It wasn’t my impression that he was pulling any punches on the Trump regime before his show was cancelled, but now look for him to go after the oligarchs even harder. Colbert isn’t going away.
Great piece. Interestingly, what you're describing has many echoes with Interwar Italy and Germany. Fascism definitionally employs corporatism as its monetary system. The plutocracy in a capitalist society tends to love the unchecked power fascism uses to crush their opponents, whether they be business rivals, labor unions or ideological foes wanting to abandon capitalism. And, the plutocrats (oligarchs who amass power through their wealth) usually think their great wealth was derived by their own brilliance, brilliance that will allow them to control Dear Leader, who is invariably a jack ass.
Historically, they never manage to control the jack ass in no small part because they themselves aren't brilliant at all, rather, they are merely vicious, delusional and often have wealth due to circumstances beyond their control. The other reason they have never controlled Dear Leader is obvious: a corporation is always a part of something whereas Dear Leader controls a bundle of sticks (the literal translation of the word fascism), a bundle of somethings. Importantly, those somethings include military, police and 'parallel' police forces (think Brownshirts, Blackshirts and *ahem* ICE *cough cough*).