CBS’ recent cancellation of the popular The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is yet another case of heavy‑handed political and corporate meddling in the role of media in the US. It occurred just three days after the comedian and talk show host criticised CBS’s parent company Paramount for settling a multimillion‑dollar lawsuit with Trump, with Colbert calling that settlement “a bribe”.
In its announcement, CBS stated it will end The Late Show after May 2026 due to a declining audience, marking the end of a 33‑year run for the live‑audience series.
But, lower Nielsen ratings or not, the timing of Paramount’s move to cancel one of its signature series may itself prove that the decision was about more than profit. It cannot be ignored that within a few days of both moves, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally approved the Skydance‑Paramount merger after months of stalling, an $8bn deal that will add to the mountain of monopolistic moves in US media.
“This is pure cowardice,” David Letterman, The Late Show’s previous host from 1993 to 2015, said of Paramount’s recent decisions to cancel the show and settle the Trump lawsuit.
The US news media’s never‑ending coverage of everything Trump over the past decade and the constant back‑and‑forth over his politics, policies and practices have played a significant role in its decline. As the US lurches ever closer towards autocracy, the Fourth Estate has increasingly taken on the role of stenographer, with its normalisation of lies, gossip, craven policies and corruption as “disinformation” and “misinformation”.
But the age of Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. The combination of constant realignment to ingratiate media corporations with the political class, along with their monopolisation of media in the US over the past 45 years, has simply devastated the field. This retrenchment has severely skewed news coverage and destroyed the idea of a free press.
The landscape of US media began evolving with the gradual deregulation of both media ownership and the scope of editorial freedom in the 1980s. After 40 years of what was once the Fairness Doctrine in US media law (requiring multimedia broadcasters to air opposing views on topics of national importance, not just one perspective), the FCC voted to abolish the requirement in 1987. This came after Congress had failed to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of their attempt to codify the doctrine in a bill. Attempts to re‑establish the Fairness Doctrine have failed over the years, including the Restore the Fairness Doctrine Act that the now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard sponsored in 2019. That bill never made it to the House floor for a vote.
In a truly bipartisan effort during the 1990s, many of the remaining regulations that protected US media from monopolisation and the influence of billionaires and mega‑corporations were dismantled. The lobbyist‑influenced Telecommunications Act of 1996 made its way through Congress with overwhelming support, with only 16 “No” votes out of 430 in the House of Representatives, and five voting “No” out of 96 in the Senate.
The deregulations, intended to foster more competition between media corporations and their multimedia platforms, actually did the opposite by extending media monopolisation. Between 1983 and 2015, the number of corporations that collectively owned 90 percent of the entire US media market fell from “more than 50 to just six companies”, including books, newspapers, magazines, mobile and cable television, internet and music, films and professional athletic teams. In the years since, between Viacom’s ownership of CBS and Paramount and Amazon’s huge foray into streaming services and multimedia productions, five megacorporations now control 90 percent of all US media.
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