
Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show' canceled by CBS, ends May 2026
By ALICIA RANCILIO and ANDREW DALTON
CBS is canceling 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' next May, shuttering a decades-old TV institution in a changing media landscape and removing from air one of President Donald Trump's most prominent and persistent late-night critics.
Thursday's announcement followed Colbert's criticism on Monday of a settlement between Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a '60 Minutes' story.
Colbert told his audience at New York's Ed Sullivan Theater that he had learned Wednesday night that after a decade on air, 'next year will be our last season. ... It's the end of 'The Late Show' on CBS. I'm not being replaced. This is all just going away.'
The audience responded with boos and groans.
'Yeah, I share your feelings," the 61-year-old comic said.
Three top Paramount and CBS executives praised Colbert's show as 'a staple of the nation's zeitgeist' in a statement that said the cancellation 'is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.'
In his Monday monologue, Colbert said he was "offended" by the $16 million settlement reached by Paramount, whose pending sale to Skydance Media needs the Trump administration's approval. He said the technical name in legal circles for the deal was 'big fat bribe.'
'I don't know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company," Colbert said. "But, just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16 million would help.'
Trump had sued Paramount Global over how '60 Minutes' edited its interview last fall with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Critics say the company settled primarily to clear a hurdle to the Skydance sale.
Colbert took over 'The Late Show' in 2015 after becoming a big name in comedy and news satire working with Jon Stewart on 'The Daily Show" and hosting 'The Colbert Report," which riffed on right-wing talk shows.
The most recent ratings from Nielsen show Colbert gaining viewers so far this year and winning his time slot among broadcasters, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. On Tuesday, Colbert's 'Late Show' landed its sixth nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show. It won a Peabody Award in 2021.
David Letterman began hosting 'The Late Show" in 1993. When Colbert took over, he deepened its engagement with politics. Alongside musicians and movie stars, Colbert often welcomes politicians to his couch.
Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California was a guest on Thursday night. Schiff said on X that 'if Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.'
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, released a similar statement, saying "America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.'
Colbert's late-night host counterpart on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel, shared Colbert's announcement on Instagram along with the message: 'Love you Stephen." He then directed an expletive at CBS.
Colbert has targeted Trump for years. The guests on his very first show in September 2015 were actor George Clooney and Jeb Bush, who was then struggling in his Republican presidential primary campaign against Trump.
'Gov. Bush was the governor of Florida for eight years,' Colbert told his audience. 'And you would think that that much exposure to oranges and crazy people would have prepared him for Donald Trump. Evidently not.'
Late-night TV has been facing economic pressures for years; viewership is down and many young viewers prefer highlights online, which networks have trouble monetizing. CBS also recently canceled host Taylor Tomlinson's 'After Midnight,' which aired after 'The Late Show.'
While NBC has acknowledged economic pressures by eliminating the band on Seth Meyers' show and cutting one night of Jimmy Fallon's 'The Tonight Show," there had been no such visible efforts at 'The Late Show."
Colbert's relentless criticism of Trump, his denunciation of the settlement, and the parent company's pending sale can't be ignored, said Bill Carter, author of 'The Late Shift."
'If CBS thinks people are just going to swallow this, they're really deluded,' Carter said.
AP Media Writer David Bauder contributed from New York.
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
3 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
They're Rich. They're Anti-Trump. And They Don't Want Their Big Tax Cut.
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'Imbalanced is really not good for anyone, even if you're on the positive end of that imbalance, because it's unsustainable.' Hoover's experience reflects an unusual irony of Trump's signature tax legislation: Many of its biggest beneficiaries fiercely oppose the president – and even oppose policies he is pushing that will make them richer. The mismatch is partly a result of a crucial, if ongoing, evolution of the role class plays in American politics. During the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, affluent Americans who benefited from tax cuts were more likely to be Republicans. The political party they supported delivered material benefits that boosted their pocketbooks. Democratic voters, by comparison, were more likely to be working or middle class. Now, more than half of upper-income families – defined as those earning more than $215,400 per year – vote Democratic, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey, as more highly educated voters shift to the left. The top fifth of earners went from supporting Barack Obama in 2008 by a 2.5-point margin to supporting Joe Biden in 2020 by close to 15 percentage points. 'Affluent Americans used to vote for Republican politicians. Now they vote for Democrats,' one 2023 paper found. That shift intensified during the 2024 presidential election, when large numbers of Black and Latino voters, who tend to be lower-income, defected to the Republican ticket for the first time in decades, according to several political scientists, exit polls and studies. 'There's been a lot of talk about how even though the Republican coalition has changed and gotten more working class, their policies have not,' said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. 'But there's been less attention to a similar but true fact on the other side – a lot of Democratic politicians were elected by very rich constituents who are more likely to benefit from Republican tax policy than Democratic policy.' As a result, many of the provisions of the GOP tax law will benefit a voting bloc that is increasingly Democratic. The $3.4 trillion legislation extends a lower tax rate for the top tax bracket, rejecting the president's suggestion of a new tax on million-dollar earners. It expands and makes permanent a smaller federal estate tax, allowing up to $15 million to be passed on tax-free ($30 million for couples). It also makes permanent a large deduction for businesses formed as pass-through entities, while raising the cap on what filers can deduct in state and local taxes. (The GOP's 2017 tax law also permanently lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.) 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I'm not opposed to having money,' he said. 'But at the expense of what it does to the rest of the country, it should not be a priority to give me and other rich people more money.' The willingness of some liberals to vote against their economic self-interest should give them pause before they accuse conservatives of doing the same, said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. He said Republican voters in lower-income states are often unfairly maligned this way, pointing to the 2004 book 'What's the Matter With Kansas?' 'Nothing is the matter with Kansas. The people of Kansas vote for a variety of reasons, one of which is economic self-interest,' Strain said. Some multimillionaires, such as Morris Pearl, who served as managing director at the investment firm BlackRock, say they are getting money from the tax cut they do not need. 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Yomiuri Shimbun
4 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Amid Starvation Scenes in Gaza, Trump Administration Hardens Tone on Hamas
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Much of the rest of the world has escalated its criticism of Israel, whose military operations and evacuation orders have pushed most of Gaza's 2.2 million people into an ever-shrinking fraction of the enclave, even as food supplies and access to them have diminished. But while Trump has sometimes grown exasperated with Netanyahu, he has maintained strong backing for Israel, often chiding the Biden administration for its 'weak' support and attempts to use military and diplomatic leverage to increase humanitarian assistance. Roughly a third of the Gaza population is going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations. Already overwhelmed hospitals have been reporting rising deaths from starvation and a lack of medical supplies and fuel, with increasingly shocking images of human suffering emerging daily. Aid groups say that the drastic decline in food reaching Gaza is the result of Israel blockading the enclave and, since mid-May, impeding the distribution of assistance by the U.N. and other international organizations throughout Gaza through approval delays and military no-go zones. Instead, Israel and the United States have authorized and supported a mechanism, through the recently created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, to hand out food at four limited sites located in military zones and guarded by U.S. security contractors. Despite U.S. and Israeli claims that the talks broke down because Hamas doesn't want a deal, many analysts say the impasse is due to fundamental differences over its terms. 'Hamas wants a deal,' said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who has advised both Republican and Democratic administrations. 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In a statement Friday, Qatar and Egypt, mediators along with the U.S., indicated that as far as they were concerned, 'some progress was achieved during the most recent intensive round of negotiations,' and the talks were only suspended. 'Consultations before resuming dialogue once again is a normal procedure within the context of these complex negotiations,' the joint statement said. Trump, who softened his policy on Ukraine in part because he said he was disturbed at civilian suffering caused by Russian attacks earlier this year, has not dwelled on the images of starvation in Gaza and has not spoken at length about them publicly in recent days. But officials say that he is aware of the humanitarian situation and it is influencing his decisions. Trump 'has seen the images and he does not like them,' one senior White House official wrote in a message, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president's private assessment of the humanitarian situation in Gaza. 'That's why he directed Witkoff to come up with a creative aid/food program solution. He believes it's a terrible situation and needs to end,' the senior official wrote. The creative solution referred to the GHF, the Israeli- and U.S.-backed effort to replace the U.N.-coordinated system for aid that had operated in Gaza for decades, the senior official said. Israel charges that the U.N. is corrupted by Hamas. Hamas, which has run the Gazan government for nearly two decades, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 and taking 250 hostages. The group continues to hold about 50 hostages who were abducted that day. About 20 are still believed to be alive. Israel's retaliatory military campaign to eliminate Hamas and free the hostages has left most of Gaza in ruins and more than 60,000 dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but says the majority of the dead are women and children. U.S. officials have repeatedly spoken of the success of the GHF, pointing to figures that show it has delivered more than 80 million meals in boxes calibrated to feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days since late May. But its operations have also led to chaos and violence, with crowds of civilians desperately and dangerously rushing toward distribution points. Hundreds have been killed, shot at by Israeli troops who allege they pose a threat, or trampled in the surge toward food. The U.N., as well as many other aid groups, have refused to join the GHF on grounds that it violates their principles of neutrality, while endangering civilians. In virtual remarks to reporters Friday, GHF spokesman Chapin Fay repeated the foundation's invitation to collaborate, offering 'free' trucks, drivers and security escorts for U.N. convoys that are often attacked by hungry civilians and armed actors as they try to deliver food and medicine. Israel has said the U.N. and others are free to distribute food, but their own incompetence and Hamas sympathies are preventing it. Israel, and the GHF, say that hundreds of food-laden trucks have been inspected by the Israel Defense Forces and are waiting just inside the enclave for U.N. pickup. 'It's a moment for the United Nations and the entire humanitarian community to step up, not step back,' Fay said. 'Let's stop pretending there's only one way to deliver aid. … Let's stop letting organizational ego dictate operational decisions. The old model is broken, and ours is working.' In a letter Thursday to GHF Executive Chairman Johnnie Moore, U.N. Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher 'reiterated that the U.N. stands ready to engage with any partner to ensure desperately needed humanitarian aid reaches the people in Gaza,' a U.N. spokeswoman, Stephanie Tremblay, told reporters Friday. But, she said Fletcher wrote, 'any such partnership must adhere to the globally accepted principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence. This means that aid must go where needs are greatest and without discrimination, and that we answer to civilians in need, not the warring parties.' He expressed a willingness to meet with Moore. In a letter of reply Friday, released by the foundation, Moore said that the 'GHF exists to be part of the solution, not to replace or rival any institution, but to help fill the gaps with transparency and effectiveness. We are willing to put our differences aside and to adapt to help people now.' Moore said he looked forward to a face-to-face meeting, although none is known to be scheduled. On Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney became the latest world leader to call for the GHF program to end. 'Israel's control of aid distribution must be replaced by comprehensive provision of humanitarian assistance led by international organizations,' who said blocking such aid 'is a violation of international law.' U.S. officials have strongly rejected the idea that Israel was responsible for the lack of food, charging Hamas with 'weaponizing' and stealing aid provided by the U.N. and others, and calling for additional international support for the foundation's efforts. 'Of course we want to see as much aid getting into Gaza as possible in a way that is not being looted by Hamas, and this mechanism, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has been a way to do that,' Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesperson, said at a briefing Thursday. Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of the Biden administration's support for Israel during the start of the Gaza war, said that for the U.S. government there was now a 'sunk costs' problem with Israel. 'Contemplating the fact that our partner is now engaged in the forcible starvation of a people it has spent the last two years bombing means a lot of politicians have to either do what politicians are worst at and admit they have been wrong, or ignore the evidence of their eyes and find some way to avoid facing the truth,' Paul said. Some former officials said that Trump's viewpoint on the conflict on Gaza has been clear and consistent, even as the suffering becomes more apparent. 'As tragic as the suffering is of the Palestinians in Gaza, President Trump is not fooled by Hamas' vicious strategy of weaponizing civilian suffering to manipulate the world,' said Jason Greenblatt, who served as White House envoy to the Middle East during Trump's first term and had also been a longtime attorney to the president.


Yomiuri Shimbun
5 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Paramount Global Says Skydance Merger Should Close in Two Weeks
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