Meet Stephen Colbert's Biggest Fans: Congressional Democrats
When even Keith Olbermann is providing a much-needed sanity check, it says something.
Not even Stephen Colbert can survive the changes that are underway at large media organizations. CBS announced earlier this week that the network is canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a program that has existed in some form for 33 years—the last 10 of which were helmed by Colbert.
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He's not exiting the airwaves immediately; the show will limp on for another 10 months. Still, the timing of the news has raised the suspicions of liberal viewers. CBS' parent company, Paramount, is attempting to sell to the media company Skydance: a merger that requires the approval of the Trump administration's Federal Communications Commission (FCC). (President Donald Trump recently sued CBS after he claimed the network improperly edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election cycle. The network settled for $16 million.)
Paramount does not want to anger Trump right now, out of fear that his FCC could kill the sale. Perhaps axing a notoriously anti-Trump comedian was another component of the deal—or at the very least, Paramount hoped it might please the administration.
Private media companies feeling compelled to kowtow to a thin-skinned president on matters of speech is obviously a terrible situation. But there are other, more benign explanations for the Colbert cancellation: His show was reportedly losing $40 million a year. In the heyday of late-night, a program like The Late Show could justify a massive budget, a staff of over 200 people, and $15 million for a host. But people aren't watching nearly as much cable television anymore; modern consumers get their entertainment and news from streaming and social media. YouTube has won the war for your attention, and everybody else is going to have to get leaner in order to survive at all.
Given that, it's not really surprising the company would decide to retire an incredibly expensive product that doesn't really fit with the times. Young people don't really want to watch increasingly stale comedians making somewhat obvious jokes about Trump with in-studio audiences laughing on cue. They find this setup quaint and bizarre.
This is a long way of saying that you don't have to buy into some sinister Trumpian explanation for why Colbert is getting canceled. Even Keith Olbermann, who is perhaps the most relentlessly partisan, hysterically anti-Trump mainstream progressive commentator on the planet, thinks that all things being equal, this was probably just a business decision.
Aaron? If they fired him to appease Trump, why are they letting him remain on the air as a lame duck, with nobody to stop him saying whatever he wants, for the next TEN MONTHS? They may have timed it to use it as a sop to Trump but this is like Phil Donahue getting cancelled.
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) July 22, 2025
When even Olbermann is providing a much-needed sanity check, it says something.
Biggest Fans
Other late-night hosts are standing with Colbert: Jon Stewart railed against CBS in a "go fuck yourself" musical rant. And to be fair, Trump is certainly acting like he had something to do with all of this, even implying that next he's going to get Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon off the air.
The most surprising—not entirely expected might be a better way of putting it—display of solidarity, however, is coming not from other late-night hosts but from the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Democratic congressman after Democratic congressman has weighed in to demand Colbert's reinstatement, as if he were some important general whom Trump had fired unceremoniously. Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.) circulated a petition demanding that CBS bring back Colbert, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) objected to the suspicious timing of the cancellation. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has posted about it on X multiple times.
What I find strangest about their objections is that the Democratic Party is very much associated with the idea that the federal government should micromanage the mergers and acquisitions of private companies. In fact, it's a textbook progressive opinion. While some Republican politicians have recently become more enamored with antitrust, it's leftist progressives like Warren and Sanders who have historically led the charge to give the federal government more authority over exactly the kind of business deal that Paramount and Skydance are attempting to pull off.
And it's not as if Democrats have generally refrained from bullying private companies over speech-related decisions. In 2021, Democratic lawmakers sent threatening letters to Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and other cable providers in order to persuade them to stop carrying conservative news channels. Warren herself has a long and storied history of vowing to regulate private companies because she doesn't like what they're saying. Former President Joe Biden said Facebook was morally responsible for COVID-19 deaths because it wouldn't delete vaccine-skeptical content, and his comms team implied that regulation was right around the corner if the social media giants did not fall in line.
Perhaps progressives expected that the sort of people doing oversight and regulation with respect to such transactions would always and only be high-minded liberals with no political agendas of their own, simmering grievances, or axes to grind. If that's the case, one hopes that Donald Trump has disabused them of this notion.
If Democrats have suddenly decided they want to live in a country where the federal government takes a more hands-off approach when it comes to private communications companies, then we libertarians welcome them to the club. But one suspects it's more like this: We hate when Trump bosses the media around. That's our job!
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