Colbert, CBS, and media’s final surrender | Will Bunch Newsletter

Twice already this year, frequent hellstorms have knocked down giant trees out here at our Delco home, in addition to the unpredictable power outages. The soggy air outside feels more like Manila than Philadelphia. Climate change is affecting everyone in one way or another, and I suspect history will remember the summer of 2025 for what we’re not talking about, instead of Jeffrey Epstein or whatever. “Just a distraction”? Arguably that’s every story that’s not about human pollution.

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OK, I know that the “C” in CBS, stands for “Columbia,” but the political brouhaha over its looming ouster of top-rated late-night comedian Stephen Colbert is only the latest sign that it ought to be called the Contradiction Broadcasting Network.

Founded in 1927 and often the leader in both prime-time entertainment and news during the glory days of 20th century postwar TV monoculture, CBS’s iconic reporters of that era are — in a highly fraught moment for mass media — held aloft as beacons of a time when journalistic integrity and the trust that flows from that were at their peak.

These are stories we tell ourselves in order to live, with democracy in peril. It was no accident earlier this year that with press-hating Donald Trump returning to the White House, the play honoring the zenith of that legend — Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 takedown of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy — became Broadway’s most-talked-about production and a CNN simulcast.

The play (and the 2006 movie it sprung from) does a good job showcasing the political and advertising pressures Murrow faced in taking on McCarthyism, but the real-life story is less black and white than the George Clooney-directed film. Under fire from notorious decades-long FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who considered its 1940s journalism on topics such as racial justice as sympathetic to communism, CBS became the only network to demand all employees sign a loyalty oath to the U.S. government.

You may also know the story of CBS anchor Walter Cronkite’s 1968 reporting trip to Vietnam, during which he came to believe that U.S. generals were lying to him and he returned with a call for a negotiated end to the war, which helped shape public opinion and may have played a role in Lyndon Johnson’s shock decision not to seek reelection. But that happened against the backdrop of CBS brass and their censors’ long-running war on the network’s top variety act, the Smothers Brothers, whose growing opposition to Vietnam contributed to their eventual abrupt 1969 cancellation, in an incident that 2025’s Colbert controversy loudly echoes.

CBS News was hailed in the early 1970s for its Watergate coverage, yet in 1974 — the year Richard Nixon resigned — then-CBS president Arthur Taylor drafted a letter explaining how he was trying to make news coverage friendlier to big business.

The reality is this: the leaders of CBS, and especially the heads of its much-ballyhooed news division, have always been tightrope artists, executing a sometimes quite wobbly balancing act on a high-wire between the journalistic ambitions of its star talent and a corporate desire to not buck the headwinds of capitalism and anticommunism and the White House powers-that-be.

And yet it still hit like something of a hurricane Thursday when what once called itself the Tiffany Network for its high standards announced that Colbert, who’d become the king of an admittedly ever-eroding hill that is late-night network television since taking over CBS’ The Late Show in 2015, will be out of a job when his contract expires next spring.

The move didn’t come out of nowhere. To many, it felt like the dramatic dip in a long tango that began last year between Trump — ever scheming to silence his media critics, real or perceived — and CBS parent Paramount, desperate for federal approval for its $8 billion sale to Skydance Media, a company owned by the son of billionaire Trump-backer Larry Ellison.

A defamation lawsuit that Trump filed against routine editing of an interview with his 2024 election rival Kamala Harris on CBS’s flagship news show 60 Minutes — and which many legal experts saw as frivolous and lacking merit — is headed for a stunning $16 million settlement with the president, with the money funneled into a slush fund that may or may not someday be his presidential library.

The deal is so outrageous that some pols like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have urged looking into whether it could be considered a bribe. Both the CBS News chief, Wendy McMahon, and 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens have quit during the machinations, but with or without them the network may soon be veering to the right. It’s been reported that conservative journalist Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press website, may serve as a news guru to the new CBS.

In this environment, Colbert — who became famous mocking right-wing punditry on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report — stood out like a purple, leathery hand. He rode the absurdities of Trump’s two presidencies to the top of the midnight ratings, with boomers who loathe POTUS 45/47 and still know how to find CBS on their remote his core audience. A devout Catholic whose morality fuels his comedy rather than deadening it, Colbert always danced near the edge — especially just a couple days before his ouster when he called the $16 million settlement “a big fat bribe.”

Still, a seemingly funnier joke came when CBS claimed it’s not renewing Colbert for “business reasons.” But many who follow the money of today’s fractured media say there actually is something to this. It’s true that a) The Late Show lost $40 million last year; that’s probably less than what’s under the cushions of Skydance’s David Ellison’s sofa, but it’s also not a profit, and b) network late-night shows are lumbering dinosaurs, when most folks get their amusement, such as that exists nowadays, from tiny snippets on TikTok or YouTube.

I’ve even seen it suggested that Team Paramount is playing some four-dimensional chess here — that it never intended to renew a money-losing Colbert but that it timed its move to flatter Trump, so that he could claim another trophy of antlers to mount in his expanding hallway of fallen media prey.

But that’s the real point here. Whatever the bottom-line rationale for getting rid of Colbert, the perception that a dictatorial Trump is crushing not just critical journalism but now even comedy is ultimately more important. Because that’s exactly the message that Trump wants to send to anyone even thinking about digging into his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — or coming up with the killer joke.

Colbert’s ouster is, after all, just one more exclamation point on an authoritarian capture of the American mainstream media. Another is last week’s vote to federally defund the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), which (despite occasional driveway cringe moments) has been a crucial source of journalism, especially on the local level.

More tactics include other ludicrous lawsuits, denying access, and maybe the most insidious: billionaire owners, or purchasers of major outlets, who are simply simpatico with American autocracy. Journalist Aaron Ruper called it “oligarchic solidarity” — that rather than the conventional wisdom that media overlords are bowing down to Trump, they are actually cheering the death of liberty along with him, with thunderous applause.

That’s why the end of Colbert feels much, much worse than, say, a Smothers Brothers-type move, despite the surface similarities. Too many Big Media owners today don’t just want an LBJ or a J. Edgar Hoover off their back, but they want to proactively join the regime in piling on the masses. There’s no Murrow or Cronkite with the clout or the swagger to knife through the corporate baloney. This is not your father’s abusive military-industrial complex, but a 21st century dictatorship that has captured the mainstream media.

No joke.

Question: As we suffer death by a thousand cuts (literally), what “break glass in case of emergency” actions should the American public be taking to show that we’re furious about the multigenerational damage Trump and the GOP are doing to America’s institutions and standing in the world? Mass strikes? — Richard Robbins (@richnyc.bsky.social‬) via Bluesky

Answer: Richard, you and I have been thinking about the same thing. I was struck by last week’s “Good Trouble” protests that meant to honor the civil rights icon John Lewis but didn’t feature the thing that made Lewis famous: civil disobedience. That’s understandable in a time when blocking a street could result in a federal indictment, but how do you fight fascism with the intensity it deserves? The public seems to have little appetite for a mass strike — so far, anyway — but corporate and media obedience to a dictator presents a golden opportunity for boycotts. Given the recent pro-Trump moves by CBS, canceling your subscription to Paramount Plus or boycotting CBS’s biggest advertisers, or at least the ones that aren’t cancer drugs, would be a place to start.

Last week I asked whether the Jeffrey Epstein mess was more about right-wingers getting exposed as conspiracy kooks, or whether there actually is a major coverup here, to protect Donald Trump? The overwhelming answer from you was, why not both? “The MAGA movement most definitely contains a...ton of conspiracy kooks, but like a stopped clock, even they can be correct about something once or twice,” Linda Mitala wrote. “There is something here, whether it is Trump himself, or other powerful people who have his ear, and they have the money and power to offer Trump to sweep this away, I don’t know...” Gay West-Klien agrees: “Bottom line, there are a lot of ‘clients’ who do not want these records made public.”

📮 This week’s question: About the end of Stephen Colbert at CBS — do you think that age of late-night comedy is over and that this was an inevitable “business decision”? Or is it simply a case of a dictator silencing the comedian who made fun of him? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Stephen Colbert” in the subject line.

“The fog of war” is a term that often seeks to explain the inexplicable in modern conflict, especially when drone strikes or a burst of machine gun fire kills innocent civilians. But in Gaza, where Israel continues to aggressively wage warfare long after the Hamas terrorists who attacked them on Oct. 7, 2023 have been utterly decimated, “the fog of war” can no longer be used as an excuse when the same crimes against humanity happen again and again and again.

What happened in northern Gaza on Sunday is now a daily occurrence: A convoy of 25 relief trucks sought to bring food and other vital supplies into the bombed-out region. With deadly famine taking root, throngs of hungry Palestinians emerged to meet the convoy. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said its soldiers “fired warning shots in order to remove an immediate threat posed to them.” But local health officials say this was much more than a “warning”: some 73 civilians, they allege, were slaughtered by the gunfire. It was the latest such inexplicable incident in the war-torn pocket where the overall death toll of Palestinians has crossed the 59,000 mark and little children are now dying of starvation.

No wonder that Brown University’s Omer Bartov — one of the world’s top Holocaust scholars, who is Jewish and a former Israeli and IDF soldier — recently wrote in the New York Times that “my inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” And yet even as photos from Gaza grow increasingly shocking — anguished mothers holding their dead babies, rows of corpses covered in white canvass — the overall sense has become one of utter numbness. The media has moved on and campus protest has been iced, but something has also changed. Millions of American voters have lost faith in Israel as long as the extreme right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power. Whether political elites get this is another story.

“They are pro-Palestinian, and they don’t consider it being anti-Israel,” Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who lost embarrassingly in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary to pro-Palestinian-rights Zohran Mamdani, told a synagogue crowd on Sunday as he struggled to explain why young voters surged for Mamdani. But one doesn’t need a degree in rocket science to analyze the numbers. The highly regarded Quinnipiac University poll found that as recently as 2017, Democrats were more sympathetic to Israel by 13 percentage points; today, the margin has wildly flipped to 43 percentage points more favorable to Palestine, and the gap grows even wider among younger respondents. And yet most Democratic Party elites remain sympathetic to Israel.

This right now is a major disconnect as the party begins thinking about rivals to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement in the 2028 presidential election. Many of the current batch of early media favorites have been strident in their support for Israel or their condemnations of young pro-Palestinian protesters. Further foreshadowing potential discord is that two of these Israel-backing frontrunners — recent hero to anti-Trump progressives JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — are Jewish, which would likely intensify an intraparty debate over what is legitimate discourse and what is antisemitism. What seems clear is that right now, there is a wide open lane for a Democrat with anti-Trump credentials who is also willing to criticize Israel’s war crimes. The emergence of this to-be-determined candidate is a major story line to watch.

Every time I look back on columns from just four years ago, I’m amazed at what a hopeful time that the early days of the Joe Biden presidency felt like, with COVID-19 restrictions fading away and the now quaint notion that the 2020 election had been an upward pivot point for democracy. One example of this was an initiative called the New Pennsylvania Project, which was modeled after the wildly successful voter turnout campaigns in Georgia and run by a fiery activist, Kadida Kenner. I wrote: “Without new voting rights laws, turnout-boosting schemes like the New Pennsylvania Project might not only be the Democrats’ best shot, but its only path.” Read the rest: “Is the Stacey Abrams method the only hope for saving democracy in Pa.?”

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