Yesterday, it was announced that Late Night with Stephen Colbert would be coming to an end in 2026. Not only would the host be out of a job, but the decades-long Late Night would be ending in its entirety. This isn’t entirely a surprise; for weeks, rumors have been circulating that the merger between Skydance and Paramount would result in both Colbert and Jon Stewart getting axed from the corporation.
Skydance owners, Larry and David Ellison, were reportedly already planning to cozy up to Donald Trump, by giving him free political ads on their network worth up to $20 million. So, when Trump called for the firing of Colbert, there was plenty of speculation that the Ellisons would capitulate there as well. And look, they did. While Stewart still has his job, Colbert and his staff of 200 people will be out of one by next year.
It’s pathetic and scary. Paramount and the Ellisons have bowed so low to Trump that they have a perfect view of our president’s ridiculously swollen ankles. The President of the United States is now silencing his TV critics, unable to stomach the fact that even while he doles out unfathomable cruelty to us we’re still laughing at him. I’ll never be the first one to say that anything Colbert was doing was the smartest, bravest or even most entertaining comedy. But he made my mother laugh.
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What’s really terrifying is that there wasn’t a great attempt by Paramount and CBS to give a convincing alternative reason for pulling Colbert from the air. Late Night is consistently the highest rated, most viewed show in its slot. If you can’t convert 2.4 million nightly viewers into something profitable, you’re bad at your job. This was about censorship and punishment.
There will be hemming and hawing about the motives, despite the obvious reality of the situation. Why? Because billionaires are always getting the benefit of the doubt. They go around the world stealing, committing environmental crimes and making the internet worse, and yet, there’s a large segment of the population that oohs and ahhs at their entrepreneurship.
Billionaires aren’t sociopaths surrounded by sycophants; they’re leaders, businessmen. We live in a world where poor people get prosecuted for stealing meat and diapers from Walmart while Walmart CEO Don McMillon carries on the company’s decades’ long practice of egregious wage theft to applause. It’s not just that rich people are habitually pilfering our shit, either. They aren’t patrons of anything anymore, either. We’ve left the era of benevolent philanthropy and are now fully ensconced in the era of thin-skinned malevolent avarice.
Not only are these greedy bastards not patrons of art, theater or science (bombs and vanity space field trips don’t count), the billionaire class is sabotaging the forms of free-expression that existed despite them. The sometimes-brilliant, often-mean, undeniably-essential website Gawker? Pummeled out of existence by B-plot supervillain Peter Thiel. The endlessly-useful, sometimes-revolutionary platform formerly known as Twitter? Elon Musk bought it because everyone was (rightfully) making fun of him. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which is in a state of constant turmoil because of his nonstop editorial interference.
None of these men — Trump, Bezos, Musk, Thiel, the Ellisons — can stomach being the punchline. So they’re stealing our laughter too.
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