The Golden Age of Late Night, Gone
There was a time—not all that long ago—when I was a bit of a late-night talk show addict. I’m old enough to have been a fan of Johnny Carson. Letterman was the first show I ever recorded every day after I got my first DVR. I loved Craig Ferguson, and I was genuinely disappointed when his show was canceled, now over ten years ago. A buddy of mine even worked as a writer on that show.
For most of my life, I suppose I’ve been a bit of a night owl, and watching Letterman, or Leno, or Ferguson was a kind of ritual for me.
Now? Well, now I don’t even own a television. And if I’m up late, I’m probably reading a book. Which is just as well, because the quality of late-night television has fallen off a cliff. I don’t watch. I can’t stomach it. But I see the occasional clip on YouTube, and the genre has devolved into forced laughter from what amounts to the propaganda division of the Democratic Party.
Late-night comedy didn’t just drift left—it jackknifed into political tribalism. What used to be a playground for absurdity and charm has become a sermon series, delivered nightly by Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver, even Jimmy Fallon.
But for me, the worst offender is Stephen Colbert.
Colbert: From Heir to Anchor
I’ll concede that way, way back during the Daily Show days, he’d occasionally earn a guffaw—maybe even a real laugh. But his next stop, The Colbert Report, was dreadful.
Still, in 2015, he was handed the mantle—bequeathed by Letterman and Carson—and he has flown it straight into the ground.
This week, Colbert and the show were canceled by CBS.
There are reports that Colbert was making between $15 and $20 million a year. Apparently, The Late Show employed a staff of over two hundred. Advertising revenue had dropped by fifty percent in recent years, and the show was losing more than $40 million annually. CBS claims the cancellation was purely economic.
But the online left isn’t buying it. They’ve concluded the move was politically motivated—that CBS is kowtowing to the Trump administration.
You know, the way Facebook and Twitter kowtowed when Biden was in charge. Just like that.
There are few unassailable truths in the social sciences, but here’s one: monocausal explanations for social phenomena always fail. Let’s face it—if Stephen Colbert and his show were making CBS $100 million instead of losing $40 million, the politics would have worked themselves out.
Still, politics is a factor here—a huge one. And in the ultimate irony, the progressive left is now being hoisted on a petard of its own making.
The Lawsuit and the Word Salad
On October 5, 2024—just weeks before Election Day—60 Minutes aired what was widely understood to be a friendly sit-down with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee and President Trump’s opponent.
Harris may be the most inarticulate person with a public platform since Elmer Fudd. Asked a softball question about the Israel–Hamas conflict—a question any semi-competent politician would have prepped and practiced—she delivered a 179-word word salad that said absolutely nothing.
CBS actually aired the whole thing (someone surely lost their job for that), and it was comedy gold. SNL wishes.
Later, in an editing job worthy of an Emmy, CBS trimmed out 123 of those words. Suddenly, Harris was transformed—clear, cogent, even presidential. Well, maybe not presidential.
Trump sued, because of course he did.
Which brings us to the political stakes for CBS.
And no, this has very little to do with Stephen Colbert.
Colbert is dreadful. There’s a deep mine of legitimate Trump criticism—Colbert hits none of it. His shtick is a looping series of stale memes, designed more to stay in good standing with the cool kids than to make anyone laugh.
His politics? Dumbed-down Bluesky. His commentary? Predictable, smug, and painfully unfunny. And while his relentless Trump-bashing didn’t help, like I said: if the show were printing money and Colbert were even slightly amusing, he’d still be on the air.
The Rise and Ruin of the Redstone Empire
Sumner Redstone (1923–2020) was a brilliant, relentless, and famously combative media mogul who built one of the most powerful entertainment empires of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Armed with a Harvard Law degree, Redstone turned his family's modest drive-in theater business into National Amusements, which he then used as the vehicle to acquire—and control—Viacom, CBS, and Paramount.
In 2005, taking a page from the Mitt Romney “unlock shareholder value” playbook, Redstone spun off CBS from Viacom. For a while, it worked. Les Moonves was installed as CEO of CBS, and both companies flourished.
CBS became the most-watched network in the U.S. for ten consecutive years. Under Moonves, the value of CBS stock rose by more than 400%—a remarkable run for a legacy broadcaster in the streaming age.
By 2017, it looked like CBS was unassailable, Viacom was thriving, and the Redstone fortune was secure for generations—an empire with no visible cracks.
Alas, it was not meant to be.
By the late 2010s, both CBS and Viacom were losing ground to Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. Moonves—undeniably a gifted and talented media executive—resigned in disgrace in 2018 after getting caught up in the #MeToo reckoning.
CBS stock crashed, losing over 75% of its value. Viacom shares were down over 60%.
And then things really got bad.
Sumner was aging, and—as media moguls are wont to do—he took up with Manuela Herzer, an Argentine-born socialite roughly 30 years his junior. She was named his health care proxy and was set to inherit tens of millions from his estate.
Hijinks ensued. Everyone sued everyone else. At some point, it’s not clear anyone was actually watching the store.
Oh—and I almost forgot—in a last-ditch effort to try and preserve some value, CBS and Viacom re-merged in 2019, forming ViacomCBS (later renamed Paramount Global).
When Sumner Redstone died in 2020, the wheels—such as they were—came off entirely. From an estimated family fortune of $5 billion in the mid-2010s, the Redstone stake in Paramount has fallen to roughly $1 billion.
So, we have a disaster here. Since the mid-teens, the stock market is up something like 250%. The CBS–Viacom mashup is down over 80%. And now, in an attempt to keep herself out of the poorhouse, Shari Redstone, Sumner's daughter, has agreed to sell the family’s businesses.
To Skydance.
The Skydance Buyout and the Trump Factor
Skydance describes itself as a content engine for the 21st century. Perhaps more important in this context, the company is run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison.
Ellison has offered $2.4 billion for Redstone’s stake—a stake which has a market value of less than half that. It’s not a rescue. It’s a buyout. And it’s the final act of a family saga that began in a Boston drive-in and ends with a Silicon Valley prince cutting a check to make it all go away.
So, all’s well that ends well?
Ah, not so much.
Because for the Skydance deal to go through—a deal both the Redstone and Ellison families desperately want—the blessing of the federal government is required. And that government is now controlled by one Donald J. Trump.
And therein lies the rub.
After that comically bad 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, that very same Donald Trump sued CBS. The lawsuit was silly, of course, but there was a very real fear that the Trump administration might hold up the merger.
Indeed, the chances the merger would be held up by the Trump administration while the lawsuit with CBS was outstanding hovered around 100%.
So the Redstones did what anyone in their position would do: they made peace.
To grease the wheels for antitrust clearance and secure their $2.4 billion exit, CBS settled with Trump—for $16 million.
It was a shakedown. Sure. But it was also completely rational.
The left, naturally, lost its mind. Cries of censorship. Accusations of political manipulation. Howls about the death of the free press.
But give them a news cycle or two—they’ll move on.
Was Trump’s lawsuit meritless? Yes. Was CBS obviously running interference for Kamala Harris? Also yes. But who cares?
If you don’t like how CBS covers the news, don’t watch CBS.
I don’t.
Settling a nuisance suit to close a multi-billion-dollar deal is the oldest move in the book. It’s not censorship. It’s not a scandal.
It’s business.
The Market Isn’t the Problem—Government Is
And maybe—just maybe—the government should stay out of things like this.
The idea that this tie-up between CBS–Paramount Global—and Skydance raises legitimate antitrust concerns is laughable. Paramount has a market cap under $9 billion. Skydance is privately held, valued at around $4.5 billion. Combined, they control a tiny sliver of the media and entertainment marketplace. They face a gauntlet of deep-pocketed competitors. Much of what they offer to the public is free.
Even if you buy into the modern progressive antitrust philosophy—and I don’t—there’s no plausible case that this merger harms consumers or competition. It’s two modest players hoping that one plus one equals something a little more than two.
Had CBS chosen to fight Trump’s lawsuit, they almost certainly would have won. Sure, it would’ve been expensive— their legal fees might have exceeded $16 million—and probably embarrassing. But they’d have prevailed.
And it would’ve made for a more satisfying outcome: standing up to a sitting president and winning. On that point, I’ll give the progressives their due. I’d have enjoyed that too.
But that outcome isn’t possible—not in the world they created.
This is the world where routine business decisions live and die by government whim. Where commercial speech, mergers, and product launches all wait in line for political approval. A world where everyday commerce is subject to the iron fist of the state.
“When buying and selling is controlled by politicians, the first things to be bought and sold are politicians.”
That line, attributed to Ayn Rand, fits this moment perfectly. CBS bought off Donald Trump.
And the corollary is just as true:
“Business buys favors from government because government has favors for sale.”
That’s what happened here.
The Paramount–Skydance deal will be approved. Of course it will. Trump got what he wanted. CBS paid the price.
To my mind, $16 million was a small price to pay. But ask yourself: has government control over this transaction benefited anyone?
Other than Donald Trump?
Antitrust law, as it’s applied today, is not just misguided—it’s anachronistic. It’s a relic from an era of oil barons and railroad monopolies, and it didn’t apply even then. It’s dusted off every few years by bureaucrats, most recently by the Biden Justice Department, who want to prove they’re still relevant.
The only legitimate concern in any market is access. Can a newcomer enter? Can a competitor compete? And there’s no serious person claiming that the Skydance–Paramount deal would lock anyone out of anything. Quite the opposite: if you’ve got a smartphone and a TikTok account, congratulations—you’re in the game.
In the rare cases where market access is blocked, it’s not private actors doing the blocking. It’s government. Whether it’s taxi medallions, licensing boards, regulatory capture, or zoning laws, it is always the state—not the market—that builds the wall.
And that’s the irony here.
It was the Progressive project—with its unquenchable thirst to regulate, oversee, investigate, and control even the most mundane commercial activity—that made this debacle possible. It was their framework that gave Donald Trump the power to stall this merger in the first place.
It was their regulatory machine that CBS had to placate. It was their belief in an all-powerful administrative state that created a world where $16 million bribes are just the cost of doing business.
I would’ve liked to see CBS fight back. Take the lawsuit to court. Win on the merits. But I’ll settle for this: the Progressives, once again, making fools of themselves—in a system of their own making.