Consensus is forming around CBS canceling Late Show and thus firing Stephen Colbert (Go ‘Cats): They had financial reasons related to the general demise of late-night, but the optics look like an effort to appease Trump by silencing a critic and that almost certainly played a substantial role in a Mt. Healthy mixed-motive sense. News reports from last week suggested that Skydance might come for Colbert (and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on Paramount-owned Comedy Central); there might be an interesting story that Paramount did it preemptively–relieving Skydance of the need to make the move while demonstrating fealty to Trump’s FCC. And as happens whenever someone appeases Trump and attempts a figleaf justification to preserve its credibility, Trump immediately detonated plausible deniability, celebrating the firing (likely as a first step towards taking credit for it as a display of his power).
As this sorts itself out, I want to try to situate Colbert within the story of the U.S. targeting comedians for their comedy. In one sense, losing a tv job cannot compare to arresting George Carlin and especially Lenny Bruce (as depicted, the legal troubles must have affected the emotions and thus actions that killed him). On the other hand, Colbert faces not local police and prosecutors wielding state law but the President of the United States wielding the levers of federal power to coerce a private actor to do his bidding.
The better analogue to Colbert is CBS (I see a pattern) canceling The Smothers Brothers four months after Nixon was inaugurated over concerns for the show’s discussions of civil rights, Vietnam, Nixon, and other political topics. The White House complained about the show, but so did other politicians, including the Democratic senator who chaired the committee with FCC oversight. Befitting the Trump presidency, Colbert feels more personalist–Trump personally wanted Colbert fired and Paramount wanted to give something to Trump personally (besides $ 16 million) in order to speed the sale. I am not sure we can draw as straight a line from Nixon to the Smothers.
This event may stand as another example of the evolution of the state power to control critical speech. The US does not have to throw people in jail to silence them. It achieves that result extra-judicially, combining power over the economy and and the subservience of profit-motivated corporations to the same end, in a situation outside of and immune to judicial review. It also kills the long-held ideal (whether real or myth or somewhere in between) of court jester as the one person able to speak truth to power.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on July 18, 2025 at 02:02 PM