The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert tempted fate when he called Paramount Global’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump a “big fat bribe” earlier this week. Three days later, CBS announced it would end his show after the upcoming 2025-2026 season.
But despite CBS’ decision to essentially follow Trump’s instructions and cancel The Late Show after its next season, which it attributes solely to a “financial decision,” one person who knows Colbert well says his outspoken nature would have always come before the show—even through his last day in May 2026.
“Stephen is a person who really thinks about service as part of his life,” Allison Silverman, who spent four years as Colbert’s head writer on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, told the Daily Beast. “He is Catholic. His faith is really important to him, and I think that from it, he’s taken this dedication to service, and I think that he is seeing something in this situation that’s about serving something more important than Paramount or Skydance.”
Puck reported on Thursday that The Late Show lost $40 million a year and cost more than $100 million annually to produce, including between $15 million and $20 million for Colbert’s salary. All of this despite the fact that The Late Show rates ahead of its network late-night competition and just scored its ninth consecutive Emmy nomination in its category.
Still, such timing so close to Colbert’s Paramount criticism lays out the predicament high-profile media figures face in a politically fraught environment, one where Trump has tried to utilize every lever of government to attack his media enemies as media revenue and trust reach new lows.
CBS News did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
CBS co-CEO George Cheeks said the matter had nothing to do with Colbert’s content “or other matters happening at Paramount” while praising Colbert’s decade-long tenure at the network.
“Our admiration, affection, and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert and his incredible team made this agonizing decision even more difficult,” Cheeks said in a statement.
Donald Trump appeared on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” once in 2015 during his first presidential run—and then never again. Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS via Getty Images
Critics rebuked the network’s decision, however, linking it to Colbert’s criticism of the Skydance deal. “Wherever you stand politically, you have to admire @stephenathome for speaking his mind, regardless of who pays his salary,” wrote comedian Robert Smigel, who was detained at the U.S. Capitol while filming a Late Show segment in 2021, on Instagram.
Meanwhile, Trump praised the show’s demise in a Truth Social post, speculating that ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, or even the much more apolitical Jimmy Fallon, could be next. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” Trump wrote. “His talent was even less than his ratings.”
(Colbert has consistently led the late-night ratings ever since it overtook NBC’s The Tonight Show in 2017.)
By saying Colbert was “fired,” Trump also added fuel to the theory that CBS was targeting the host personally and not the long-running Late Show franchise overall.
Colbert has not shied away from taking those in power, including his own bosses, to task. After multiple women accused CBS chief Les Moonves of sexual misconduct in a July 2018 New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow, Colbert was one of the first CBS employees to address the scandal on its airwaves. He urged “accountability” for the man who hired him during a monologue at the time.
“He has stood by us when people were mad at me, and I like working for him,” Colbert said. “But accountability is meaningless unless it’s for everybody—whether it’s the leader of a network or the leader of the free world.”
After Moonves—who Colbert referred to as “my guy” during that July monologue—resigned in September 2018 after a second Farrow story, he became fodder for Colbert for months. Colbert admitted that month that “the article is extremely disturbing and, I’m not surprised, that’s it. Les Moonves is gone—for at least nine months until he does a set at The Comedy Cellar.”
And when CBS denied Moonves his $120 million severance package, Colbert gleefully played The Price is Right’s “losing” tune and joked that Moonves’ predicament could let him follow in Donald Trump’s footsteps—as U.S. president.
“What job could a famous TV billionaire with sexual assault allegations possibly get—oh, my god!” he said in December 2018.
But the media landscape—and Trump’s penchant for retribution—has changed since then. The beleaguered Paramount Global has sought to close its merger with David Ellison’s Skydance for months, which would net its controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, an estimated $2.4 billion payout. The company also incurred a $6 billion loss on its television networks last year, which followed Warner Bros. Discovery’s $9 billion write-off of its own networks, reflecting the public’s shifting media habits away from linear television.
Until recently, Trump’s open disdain for CBS had thrown the Paramount-Skydance deal into doubt. Trump sued CBS and Paramount for $20 billion over an October 60 Minutes interview with his then-rival Kamala Harris, which he claimed was deceptively edited to make Harris look better. Trump’s legal threats have also enveloped ABC News, the Des Moines Register, and, on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal for a report on his ties to the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The network disputed Trump’s claim at the time, stating that it had edited the broadcast in line with journalistic ethical standards. Still, the conflict became intertwined with federal approval of the Skydance merger after Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr linked it to his review, and the chaos surrounding the suit eventually led to the resignations of 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News President Wendy McMahon.
And yet, even as Trump and Paramount entered settlement talks—much to CBS News staffers’ chagrin—Colbert never shied away from the topic. He jokingly asked MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow during an interview on his show in May whether she faced any interference from MSNBC bosses while covering Trump, directly referencing reports that Redstone had kept tabs on Trump-related stories.
When Maddow affirmed that she had not, Colbert dug in: “You guys aren’t being sued for $20 billion?”
“Stephen really loves CBS News,” Silverman told the Daily Beast. “I think he has a long history of respecting and admiring this place that you know in his time had, in earlier years, [Walter] Cronkite, and, of course, had Edward R. Murrow… I think he has a specific relationship with CBS News, and it’s probably hard to look at that institution in this time of crisis.”
Even before the Trump era, Colbert had a reputation for aggressively going after both presidents and the media more broadly. He used his Colbert Report persona to criticize then-President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq to Bush’s face during his 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue—and the White House press corps for not properly scrutinizing the administration about the war effort.
He also jabbed the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2018 for distancing itself from its comedian, Michelle Wolf, after the first-term Trump White House criticized her set during that year’s dinner.
“Being mad at her for doing her job is like accusing the valet of briefly stealing your car,” he said at the time.
But it all stemmed from a reverence for the media as a vital American institution, which helped push Colbert to speak out against Paramount’s much-derided decision to settle.
“He hates a bully,” Silverman said, “and any sort of good comic, I think, hates bullies.”
Colbert still has 10 full months to make that hatred burn brightly for Trump before he signs off one last time.
