By Carmen Styles
Investigative Correspondent, Politics & Power
CBS announced Thursday that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026, citing “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” The network swears—cross their corporate hearts and hope to maintain broadcast licenses—that this decision is “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
Cool story, CBS. Tell me another one about how the Easter Bunny delivers quarterly earnings reports.
Because here’s what happened in the three days before CBS discovered this sudden, crushing financial hardship: Stephen Colbert went on television Monday night and called Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump exactly what it was—”a big fat bribe.”
“Paramount knows they could have easily fought it, because in their own words, the lawsuit was completely without merit,” Colbert told his audience, referring to Trump’s frivolous suit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The lawsuit that legal experts universally dismissed as First Amendment-violating revenge theater. The lawsuit that demanded $20 billion in damages for the unprecedented crime of… editing an interview for television.
But corporate cowardice has its own math, and apparently $16 million plus Stephen Colbert’s career equals regulatory approval for an $8 billion merger.
The Art of the Deal (That Definitely Wasn’t a Deal)
Let’s examine the curious timeline of events that definitely have nothing to do with each other:
July 2, 2025: Paramount settles Trump’s meritless lawsuit for $16 million, despite their own lawyers calling it “completely without merit” and “an affront to the First Amendment.”
July 15, 2025: Colbert returns from vacation and eviscerates the settlement on live television, calling it what every journalist in America was thinking but their corporate overlords wouldn’t let them say.
July 17, 2025: CBS discovers that The Late Show—the highest-rated program in late night—has somehow become financially untenable.
What a remarkable coincidence. It’s almost like someone got a phone call.
The Disappearing Resistance
The pattern extends beyond Colbert. CBS News President Wendy McMahon resigned in May, citing disagreements over the company’s “path forward.” 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens quit in April, saying he’d lost editorial independence. Both departures were widely seen as fallout from pressure to settle Trump’s lawsuit.
Now CBS is ending its 32-year late-night franchise entirely rather than replace Colbert with someone less critical of the president. It’s a remarkable act of editorial cowardice disguised as financial pragmatism.
The Real Math
Here’s the financial decision CBS actually made: They valued an $8 billion merger more than journalism. They valued regulatory approval more than their highest-rated late-night host. They valued corporate survival more than standing up to a frivolous lawsuit designed to silence critics.
Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, stands to make $1.75 billion from the Skydance deal. That’s about 109 Stephen Colberts worth of personal profit for selling out the network her father built.
David Ellison gets to buy a media empire without inheriting its biggest Trump critic. Trump gets to watch his most effective late-night tormentor disappear from television. And CBS gets to pretend this was always about the numbers.
The only financial decision here was choosing which number mattered more: ratings or regulatory approval. CBS chose approval, and American television just became a little less free.
