Next year, CBS will end The Late Show and, in doing so, part ways with its beloved host, Stephen Colbert. The network’s announcement was sudden, but the cancellation won’t take immediate effect; Colbert will continue to host until production wraps in May 2026. Colbert has hosted The Late Show for more than a decade, succeeding David Letterman during the second presidential term of Barack Obama. His shocking exit comes at a very different time in the media landscape, which has been transformed several times over by the rise of user-generated digital content, as well as a political landscape now further upset by the second election of Donald Trump.
The Late Show will have aired for nearly 33 years by the time Colbert steps down, and so for many viewers, that’s a tough loss in its own right. And yet, the much bigger backlash to CBS concerns the network’s betrayal of its host.
First, there’s the bloodless business side of this story: The Late Show reportedly employs more than 200 people and costs more than $100 million per season to produce, while losing CBS about $40 million each year. Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, recently cut 3.5 percent of its workforce—that’s several hundred employees—citing economic challenges and a worrisome outlook in traditional broadcast television. Late-night talk shows, in particular, are a vestigial format with vanishing appeal to the sort of younger viewers coveted by advertisers. So, all things considered, there’s a solid commercial rationale for canceling The Late Show, though it still leaves fans of Colbert bitterly wondering why CBS didn’t first try, as NBC has with Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, to cut costs before nixing the show altogether.
But then there’s the much juicier political angle: Colbert has spent the past decade needling Trump on The Late Show, even as CBS has in recent months tried to appease Trump on the eve of an $8 billion merger between Skydance Media and Paramount—subject to the approval of Trump’s FCC. Earlier this month, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over the supposedly deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with vice president Kamala Harris in the lead-up to the presidential election; Colbert criticized the settlement at length as a “big fat bribe” in a monologue that aired just two days before the network announced the cancellation of his show. Most experts and observers seemed to agree that Trump’s claims against Paramount were obviously frivolous and that the company would’ve very likely prevailed if the lawsuit had been taken to trial. So it’s easy to interpret the settlement and then also the cancellation of Colbert’s Late Show as the latest of several cowardly capitulations to Trump.
Naturally, Trump has weighed in on the controversy to trollishly support the more cynical interpretation of events. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” the president posted on Truth Social. In a later post, Trump added, “I hope I played a major part in it!”
On X, Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, said, “The partisan left’s ritualist wailing and gnashing of teeth over Colbert is quite revealing. They’re acting like they’re losing a loyal DNC spokesperson that was entitled to an exemption from the laws of economics.”
Here’s the thing: Kimmel relentlessly antagonizes Trump, but ABC doesn’t have a billion-dollar deal sitting on Carr’s desk at the FCC. Trump can’t stand Jimmy Fallon, either, but Fallon reportedly hates talking about politics, and over the years he’s been relatively restrained in his jabs at Trump. (Never forget when Fallon playfully mussed Trump’s hair in the buildup to the 2016 election.) If NBC suddenly announced it was ending The Tonight Show—a 71-year-old program with an even greater legacy than The Late Show—I’m sure the move would be seen as a sad but understandable outcome for a decaying format; indeed, just last year, NBC cut Fallon’s Tonight Show from five weeknights to four and furthermore laid off the house band from Seth Meyers’s Late Night. In Colbert, though, CBS is losing a center-left darling of the “resistance era,” a zany cable news satirist turned jokey but nonetheless earnest booster of Robert Mueller and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Trump’s slap fights with the media have always been somewhat silly, but in his first presidency they also seemed to suggest a certain ceiling to his appeal, a certain assurance that he would never be fully normalized in American culture, as he was invariably banned from various social media platforms and buffeted by real-time fact checks. Colbert was a prominent face of the fact that Trump was once persona non grata even in programming as innocuous as late night.
In his second presidency, however, Trump has recruited new allies in media and tech. So many bosses, including news media owners, have in the past year drastically pivoted from promoting DEI and celebrating Pride Month to drumming progressive dissidents out of their workforces and rediscovering the old joys of anti-communism. Some of these suits, such as Marc Andreessen, are true converts. Others are simply eager to appease the president or at least are loath to publicly cross him, lest they find themselves on the wrong side of a presidential screed on Truth Social. The famously opinionated Jamie Dimon can just barely bring himself to criticize Trump’s tariffs, for instance.
This is the context in which CBS is canceling Colbert, in a political climate defined by so many awkward corrections, cynical reversals, and anti-woke swings. But there’s another generally familiar and yet in this case oddly underrated bit of context for the backlash to CBS: a broad and persistent distrust of institutions, especially media institutions. This distrust is typically associated with the right, in perpetual rebellion against liberal bias in staffing and coverage, but the left is increasingly disillusioned in its own ways and for its own variety of reasons, depending on one’s position on the left-liberal spectrum and also depending on one’s age. “Young Democrats trust the media far less than older Democrats do,” according to Gallup. In such a moment, in other words, modern liberals and progressives are far less likely to simply take the word of Paramount and CBS. Younger progressives or young people in general may not particularly care about the fate of The Late Show, but they still pose a bigger problem of distrust for institutions such as CBS. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and, of course, Jon Stewart are all tapping into that distrust in their recent commiserations with Colbert.
Fans haven’t heard the last of Stephen Colbert, both because he’s being permitted to host The Late Show for 10 more months and also because he’ll undoubtedly come out of his contract at a righteous height of his standing. This isn’t the Tonight Show succession crisis of 2010, which really did at the time seem to jeopardize the mainstream comedic ascent of Conan O’Brien. Colbert came to CBS from Comedy Central, and it’s easy enough to imagine him tending a greener pasture on a network like HBO or in digital media—the latter, after all, worked well enough for Conan. It’s much harder to imagine the networks salvaging the rest of late night, and it’s even harder to imagine CBS bolstering anyone’s faith in the thing we now call legacy media in light of the settlement with Trump or the cancellation of Colbert. Trust will fall until morale improves.
