Colbert Receives a Hero’s Sendoff

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the media coverage of the end of Stephen Colbert’s late-night run on CBS, and we cover more media misses.

Read more Colbert Receives a Hero’s Sendoff

The Late Show’s Final Days

Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show will come to an end on Thursday, after eleven years on air — and claims about the left-leaning comedian being a free-speech warrior who was canceled for daring to speak out against President Trump are everywhere.

A recent segment on NBC’s Sunday Today blamed Trump for the show’s cancellation, with entertainment correspondent Chloe Melas — a former Colbert intern — telling viewers CBS was recently acquired by Skydance Media, “whose owner David Ellison is a prominent Trump supporter.”

“CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision and not related in any way to the show’s performance. But that statement doesn’t ring true to everyone,” Melas said, before introducing media reporter Brian Lowry, who explains “there was a sense the studio was eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.”

And yet, as Media Research Center’s Newsbusters points out, Ellison is not, in fact, a “prominent Trump supporter.” In 2024, Ellison donated $929,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, which was the “the largest recorded contribution that the Skydance Media CEO ever made to a federal candidate,” according to CNBC.

And never mind there being little to no evidence that Colbert’s cancellation was the result of anything other than financial calculus — the show’s ratings dropped from 3.1 million viewers in the 2017-18 season to 1.9 million in the lead up to its cancelation, while its ad revenue plummeted 40 percent for a $40 million loss — NBC is far from the only outlet claiming Trump is to blame for the cancellation of Colbert, the late-night saint.

NPR critic-at-large Eric Deggans authored a reverential eulogy for The Late Show on Monday, telling readers, “For 20 years, Stephen Colbert distinguished truth from truthiness.”

“After more than 3,000 episodes of television stretched over 20 years and two TV networks, this critic believes Stephen Colbert’s greatest legacy as a host and performer comes down to a single word,” he writes. “Truthiness.”

Colbert coined the word that represents the belief in something because it feels true, whether it actually is true.

“And now, as his Late Show ends an 11-year run Thursday — canceled by CBS despite top ratings in a move some suspect was rooted in silencing a high-profile critic of President Trump — it seems Colbert may have been felled by his stance against such thinking,” Deggans writes.

Over on CBS Mornings, co-host Nate Burleson celebrated Colbert and his fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver as “like The Avengers.”

Meanwhile, CNN’s Jake Tapper acknowledged there is “no evidence that [Trump] demanded that Colbert be fired or his show canceled,” but nonetheless peddled the theory that Trump had made clear his desires for Colbert to be ousted from his role, and that CBS moved to give the president what he wanted.

Tapper urged his viewers to consider a timeline of events that included the July 1, 2025, announcement of a settlement in which Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit against CBS over the network’s deceptive editing of a Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes. On July 14, Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe.” Three days later, CBS announced Colbert’s cancellation and on July 24, the the Federal Communications Commission approved the $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger.

“Now, we should note in the midst of all that, on July 18th, Trump posted, ‘I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,’” Tapper said. “The Kimmel kerfuffle happened two months after that.”

“Now, you can make of the timing what you will, but it is inescapable that the decision by CBS Paramount to cancel Colbert pleased Trump,” Tapper added. “And the folks who owned CBS Paramount at the time got what they wanted, and they were handsomely compensated for it.”

Still, while telling viewers about his conspiracy, Tapper acknowledged “it is absolutely true that the economics of late night television have been challenging for quite some time due to a variety of factors including more streaming competition, declining advertising dollars, and on and on.” But while late night is in fact plagued by politics, it’s certainly not in the way Colbert’s supporters would have people believe.

A recent exchange in which Colbert asked hosts of other late-night programs to make the case for late-night television succinctly showed the problem with late-night television.

As NR’s Michael Brendan Dougherty writes, not a single late-night “comedian” mentioned comedy in their responses to Colbert. And Seth Meyers’s case was downright political: “Well, if I would make my case for late night, it’s that leaders of the free world are watching it.”

Dougherty then correctly assesses that much of late-night television amounts to nothing more than “another version of Morning Joe, served late at night.”

The conservative media watchdog Media Research Center found that, since late 2022, more than 90 percent of late-night political guests have been left-wing. Last year, the group found 99 percent of all late-night political guests were left wing, while 92 percent of jokes attacked Republicans.

It’s hard to blame CBS for wanting to try something new, particularly as podcasts, streaming, and other platforms have shaken up the way media consumers choose what to watch.

The Late Show’s successor is planning a different approach to late night.

Comics Unleashed With Byron Allen will avoid politics altogether and instead focus only on making people laugh, according to Allen, the show’s creator.

“What I’m doing with Comics Unleashed, we don’t talk about politics. We don’t talk about anything that’s topical,” Allen told CNN’s Michael Smerconish. “We don’t do anything that’s racist or sexist or antisemitic or homophobic. Just be funny and don’t offend.”

“I don’t care who you vote for. I don’t care,” Allen said. “I’m here to make people laugh. You’re going to vote who you’re going to vote for, no matter what I say. It doesn’t matter. It’s not my business, do what you do. I’m here to make you laugh.”

Media Misses

• Comedian Margaret Cho claimed she gave up an acting role on the popular HBO Max show Heated Rivalry over a political threat she seems to have made up in her own mind. Cho says she was afraid to participate in the show because it was filmed in Canada and, though she is a U.S. citizen, she believed her criticism of the Trump administration and ICE could lead to her being detained at the border.
• Puck News’s John Heilemann made a recent appearance on MS NOW’s Morning Joe to claim that there is “enthusiasm” among the “MAGA base” for Trump’s “deportation agenda” because “they want to see more brown people sent out of the country.” He went on to say MAGA supporters are “willing to overlook almost anything in the service of the cause, which was ‘get the illegals.’”