CBS cancels 'The Late Show,' amid a broader federal attack on media.

On Thursday, July 17, President Donald Trump, desperate for the nation to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein, got a momentary reprieve. He scored a pair of major victories over his critics, real and imagined, and further reshaped the mainstream media landscape along the lines of his personal vendettas.

In Washington, Congress cut federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), a goal of the right for decades. The president’s loathing for PBS and NPR is such that he threatened to primary any Republican who pushed back.

Congressional Republicans did as told, even though their rural constituents will be the hardest hit– people who depend on those stations for earthquake and flood warnings.

“It has a technical name: It’s ‘big fat bribe.’”

The same day in New York, Trump got a bonus. The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, Trump’s most highly rated late-night comedy critic, was fired. Just three days earlier, Colbert had roasted his corporate bosses, CBS and its parent company, Paramount. Paramount had paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against 60 Minutes while a deal for the Ellison family’s Skydance to buy Paramount hung in the balance at Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. Colbert quipped, “I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It’s ‘big fat bribe!’”

Days later, Colbert got word that he was getting the ax: At the end of his contract in May 2026, CBS will let him go. What’s more, network executives said that The Late Show itself, which David Letterman founded in 1993, would cease to exist.

We still don’t know if CBS was pressured into firing Colbert or simply offered him up as a sacrifice to appease Trump’s FCC. Despite the timing, and the billion-dollar stakes around the Skydance deal, CBS executive George Cheeks denied that the move was political and insisted that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision.”

Late-night talk shows have struggled to turn a profit for their corporate owners for years. They remain expensive relics of a long-gone three-network broadcast world. Seven years ago, late night cleared $439 million; last year, that total was cut in half, to $220 million.

While the financial free fall is real, so is the precise political timing of the Colbert decision.

Colbert called the payoff “a big fat bribe” on Monday, then Skydance’s David Ellison met with the FCC’s Brendan Carr on Tuesday. At the meeting, an FCC filing states that Ellison and his lawyer “discussed Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’ editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers.”

On Thursday, Colbert announced the show was over.

BEN SCHWARTZ is an Emmy-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Nation (where this story first appeared) and other publications.