Calling it a financial decision, CBS announced that it will end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and retire The Late Show franchise in May next year. Photo / Getty Images
Calling it a financial decision, CBS announced that it will end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and retire The Late Show franchise in May next year. Photo / Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Friday celebrated the recently announced cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which CBS has said was “purely a financial decision”.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. He alsoattacked late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon but praised Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld.
CBS said the cancellation was an “agonising decision” that was “not related to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount”.
The announcement came days after Colbert spoke out against the decision this month by Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, to pay $16 million (NZ$27m) to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump during last year’s presidential campaign over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.
Trump in late October alleged that his electoral chances were harmed when the network aired two versions of an answer given by Harris. CBS has maintained that Harris’ answer was edited for time, not manipulated to make her look better.
Colbert has connected the settlement to Paramount’s pending $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, which requires approval from the Federal Communications Commission and its Trump-picked chairman, Brendan Carr. The “technical name in legal circles” for the settlement, Colbert said on his Monday show, is a “big fat bribe”.
