Colbert’s Termination Is a Corporate Assault on Dissent and a Victory for Trump

By Jeff Cohen

When media critic A.J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker 65 years ago that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” he might have glimpsed a media system dangerously dominated by a small number of companies.

But it’s unlikely he could have foreseen a president as authoritarian as Donald Trump, and media conglomerates eager to capitulate to him.

Thanks to the Paramount conglomerate and its greed-fueled boss, Shari Redstone, the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will vanish next year. After the Trump administration responds by approving the Paramount merger with Skydance, Redstone will be roughly $2 billion richer than she is today, and Paramount/CBS may become even more Trump-friendly.

Months ago, when I predicted the demise of Colbert or “The Daily Show,” another Paramount property, it sounded paranoid. But now it’s reality. (“The Daily Show” may be next on the chopping block.)

In recent months, we’ve seen one media conglomerate after another offer what amounted to multimillion-dollar bribes to Trump by settling frivolous Trump lawsuits that these companies could not possibly have lost in court.

Last December, the Disney Company paid Trump a thinly-disguised bribe — $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library – to settle a harassment lawsuit against ABC News over a segment mentioning E. Jean Carroll’s victorious case against Trump.         

In January, Mark Zuckerberg’s  Meta made a bribe-like payment of $25 million to Trump to settle a ridiculous lawsuit after the company followed its own well-understood guidelines and suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram for inciting violence on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. (Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund.)

But there was a snag in settlement negotiations between Paramount and Trump over an even more laughable suit he could never win in court. This one concerned how CBS “60 Minutes” had edited an interview with Kamala Harris, a suit that Paramount had called “meritless.”

During  negotiations, respected executive producer of “60 Minutes” Bill Owens resigned over Paramount meddling, soon followed by the resignation of the CEO of CBS News. But that wasn’t enough to get the suit settled, and it was far from sufficient to get the Trump administration to approve the Paramount merger. That’s when I worried that Colbert or Jon Stewart would have to be sacrificed to placate the authoritarian-in-chief and get Paramount and Redstone the riches that a merger would bring.

Three weeks ago, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle the suit, amid rumors of side-deals that content would shift at the new Paramount.  And now Colbert, one of Trump’s most effective critics, is being shown the door. On last Monday’s show, Colbert carried on at length, making fun of what he called Paramount’s “big, fat bribe.”

Colbert is funny.

What’s not funny is that our country’s democratic experiment is on the verge of collapse – and it has less to do with Trump than with the capitulation of corporate liberals and corporate centrist institutions to Trump.  

Big universities have capitulated. Big law firms have capitulated. Big media companies have capitulated.

The lesson to be learned from today’s political reality is that big corporate institutions don’t care about democracy or free speech. They will bend the political system toward their own economic benefit – and be complicit with authoritarianism if it keeps getting them wealthier.

The conglomerates that dominate our media and our society have one and only one value: profit-maximization. This was pretty-much admitted by Shari Redstone’s late father, Sumner, who built the Viacom (now Paramount) media conglomerate. Sumner Redstone was considered a liberal, a son of Massachusetts who’d been friendly with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for president. But Redstone famously endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004.

As Redstone explained: “I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom. . . I don’t want to denigrate Kerry, but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.”

I know I’m not the only progressive who has survived the Trump years with my sanity intact thanks in large part to TV comedians employed by media conglomerates: Colbert (Paramount), Jon Stewart and team (Paramount), Jimmy Kimmel (Disney), Seth Meyers (Comcast); and the best investigative journalist on mainstream TV, John Oliver (Warner Discovery).

There’s a quote usually attributed — perhaps inaccurately — to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I’ve offered a twist on this quote for the Trump era: “In a time of political craziness, keeping one’s sanity is a revolutionary act.”

It’s hard to stay sane without laughter, and the comedians listed above are often uplifting. But just as we’ve moved to independent news outlets out of distrust for corporate news, we’re likely to be looking outside the media conglomerates for our comedy when many a truth is truly spoken in jest.  

Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.