No. No, no. At all. No.: Colbert is still processing CBS’ shocking decision
Why would News cancel the number one late night show for nine years in a row?
Stephen Colbert isn’t sure.
The “Late Show” host reflected on the network’s surprise decision in a wide-ranging interview with GQ, published Monday, in which he declined to say News fired him for political reasons but pointedly stopped short of telling others not to stick to their own opinions.
The long-running show will end in May 2026. News announced the programming change in July, just days after Colbert criticized parent company Paramount Global for reaching a settlement with President Donald Trump for between $16 million and $32 million that News’ own lawyers previously dismissed as “meritless.”
Colbert called the payment a “huge bribe” on his show. At the time, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, was threatening to block the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media unless they agreed to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
(It’s no coincidence that, before his appointment to the FCC, Carr helped write Project 2025, a far-right fascist playbook that is so toxic that Trump often denied it had anything to do with it.)
Colbert said he could “understand” why people believe the decision was politically motivated, but he’s not willing to go to that point.
Danny Moloshok/Invision for the Television Academy via News
“News or the parent corporation…decided to write a check for $16 million to the president of the United States for a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount’s own lawyers, said has no merit,” he told GQ.
“And it clearly damages the reputation of the network, the corporation and the news division. So it’s not clear to me why anyone would do that except to curry favor with a single individual.”
If ending Colbert’s show was part of the deal to appease Trump, it appears to have worked.
“I love that Colbert was fired,” Trump wrote in a July 18 post on social media. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
(Disney obediently killed Kimmel’s show two months later, only to revive it after a Disney boycott threatened the company’s core business.)
But ultimately, none of that concerns Colbert, he said, noting that he has worked well with News and that engaging in political speculation would not be fruitful.
“I’ve had a great relationship with News. It’s one of the reasons why this was so surprising and shocking that there was no preamble to this,” Colbert said. Underscoring the surprise: Colbert said network executives did not inform him of their decision: He found out first from his manager.
Which doesn’t mean I understood it.
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“No. No, no. Not at all. No,” he said. “I mean, I’ve accepted it. I’ve understood that in my head. But in terms of how I feel about it, no, I don’t know because the shows go on. I don’t necessarily know how I’ll feel about it until I don’t do it anymore, because it’s all-consuming.”