The show’s over: Stephen Colbert is cancelled … and so is satire in America

It was in many ways a death foretold. Earlier this month, Paramount, which owns CBS, betrayed its staff – along with the rest of US journalism – by agreeing to pay Trump $16m in a legal settle­ment. Trump had sought $20bn in damages over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with former vice president Kamala Harris that aired before last November’s election. The case was meritless on every level. As a transcript proved, Trump’s claim that CBS modified an answer from Harris about Israel to make her sound more coherent was completely specious.

An excerpt from the interview was merely cut into two shorter pieces to air on two different programmes. Of course, from a legal as opposed to an ethical point of view, it wouldn’t have mattered if 60 Minutes had tidied Harris’s response. With the First Amendment still in force, there was no basis for a legal claim.

Yet Paramount agreed to pay up, giving the funds to Trump’s future monument to himself – his ­presidential library. It did so, many believe, simply because Brendan Carr, whom Trump appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was holding hostage its $8bn sale to entertainment company Skydance until a settlement was reached. Now the sale can proceed. (Skydance is controlled by David Ellison, the son of software mogul Larry Ellison.)

Everything about the lawsuit – and the capitulation by the house of broadcaster Edward R Murrow – was an insult to press freedom and a symptom of its decline under the ­second Trump administration. No one explained this more clearly than Colbert himself in an opening broadcast earlier last week: “I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles,” Colbert said. “It’s a big, fat bribe.”

Three days later, he was cancelled. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, among others, have questioned if the decision was a deal sweetener for the ­president. Whether intended as a gift or not, the White House has received it well. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” Trump gloated on Truth Social, the social media company he owns. “His talent was even less than his ratings.” Emboldened by the CBS capitulation, which follows a similar surrender by Disney-owned ABC, Trump has now filed suit against the Wall Street Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, asserting that the paper libelled him by reporting on the existence of a lubricious birthday card he allegedly sent to his friend Jeffrey Epstein.

George Cheeks, CBS CEO and president, has said that killing The Late Show was a financial decision. It is true that Colbert’s broadcast, while the best-rated and most acclaimed of the late-night shows, has made recent losses. But some at CBS have also claimed that their settlement with Trump was not made for the sake of securing the FCC’s approval for a sale.Walter Cronkite, legendary anchor of CBS Evening News, who more than any other journo exposed the “credibility gap” over Vietnam, is spinning in his grave.

That other purposes were at play is suggested by reports of David El­li­son’s ­ringside chats with Trump at two Ultimate Fight­ing Championship matches in Miami – one of the new venues where the people’s business is now conducted. Somehow, Trump came away with the understanding that the network’s future owners will deliver $15m of advertising value for conservative causes. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Colbert’s termination as another unwritten codicil.

Whatever the motives, The Late Show’s demise is a blow not just to comedy but to democracy. Colbert first gained notice as a correspondent on The Daily Show, the nightly news parody hosted by Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. There he developed the high-­energy, low-wattage rightwing political pundit Stephen Colbert, based on Fox News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Colbert described his airhead alter ego as “a well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot”.

Once launched on his own Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, he performed this send-up nightly for close to a decade without ­breaking character. It was his ­proto-Maga doppelganger who gave us ­“truthiness”, the quality of seeming, rather than actually being, true. Colbert played out this parody of rightwing media while disgorging fallacious commentary, posing moronic questions to real experts and covering political conventions. An inspired and disciplined improvisation, it was sustained performance art at a level US television had not seen before and has not seen since. Even conservatives enjoyed it, though some did not get the joke.

When Colbert replaced David Letterman as the host of CBS’s Late Show in 2015, his admirers feared that he would be domesticated by the more conventional format. He never was. No longer in character, he mixed stinging political monologues and skits with celebrity interviews and musical performances. No one on TV has been better at puncturing political humbug. Americans will have 10 more months to enjoy it before the final episode airs next May.

Jacob Weisberg is the former editor of Slate and co-founder of the podcasting company Pushkin Industries. He chairs the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organisation that supports global press freedom

Americans could soon see the loss of further TV and radio shows, after Congress voted last week to rescind the $1.1bn allocated to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting across the next two years. The body oversees the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), accounting for news, educational and cultural programming. It also broadcasts shows like the globally successful This American Life.

The White House has previously alleged that PBS and NPR “spread radical, woke propaganda”. Trump celebrated the vote outcome on Truth Social, calling the public broadcasting services “atrocious”.

NPR’s network of more than 1,000 member stations – which broadcast to communities across the US, including many rural and under-served audiences – are likely to suffer most from the cuts. NPR warned that many radio stations could be forced to close. PBS CEO and President Paula Kerger described the move as “against the will of the American people”. NPR CEO Katherine Maher added that the cuts would cause an “irreversible loss” to public radio.

In May, long-running kids TV show Sesame Street struck a deal with Netflix to help safeguard the future of Elmo and co, after Trump moved to block federal funding to PBS.

Rachel Healy

Photograph by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty