Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Paramount Global corporation has fired late night comedian Stephen Colbert even though Colbert dominated his time spot. Paramount owns CBS. In the age of creeping Trumpian fascism, this firing may be more than a typical studio cost-cutting measure taken in the shadow of a looming merger.
I feel badly for Mr. Colbert, whom I once met and whom I deeply admire, and wish him the best going forward.
Paramount Global is owned by Shari Redstone’s National Amusements, which began as a theater chain but now owns everything from Star Trek to Argentina’s Telefe and the UK’s Channel 5. One of the ways America descended into its current authoritarianism was precisely the media consolidation that the government’s antitrust institutions have allowed to happen, abetted by a lapdog Congress glad to remove obstacles to a handful of billionaires owning every news and entertainment outlet.
In more consolidation, Skydance Media LLC, a production company based in Santa Monica, is bidding $2 billion to buy National Amusements from Redstone, whose father founded it in the late 1950s. Skydance is controlled by David Ellison, a Silicon Valley nepo baby and son of Larry Ellison of Oracle fame. David Ellison is another MAGA billionaire. Both father and son hang out with Trump and favor his policies (likely just the one policy, cutting taxes on the ultra-wealthy and tossing the poor to the wolves).
The Trump administration gets to decide whether the Skydance – Paramount – merger goes through.
Trump had sued CBS over a “60 Minutes” news segment, a suit that had no legal merit. He routinely sues news outlets and if the company is brave enough to call his bluff, the courts invariably slap down the suits on first amendment grounds. But Paramount folded, offering $16 million to the Trump presidential library to make the suit go away. So we already know that they are willing to throw CBS News under the bus to get the merger done.
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Why not throw Colbert, a prominent satirist and critic of Trump, under the bus, too — especially with a $2 billion merger hanging in the balance? Senator Elizabeth Warren posted, “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery. America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”
Obviously the Skydance purchase of National Amusements is bad for ordinary Americans, concentrating media power even further in fewer and fewer hands. David Ellison is promising “balance,” and we know what “fair and balanced” meant at Rupert Murdoch’s most successful plot on America, Fox Cable News, which acted as a Trojan Horse for Trumpian fascism sort of the way Joseph Goebbels did effective propaganda for Adolf.
Colbert got a break as a writer for NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, and then became a regular on John Stewart’s Daily Show. Comedy Central — which is owned by, you guessed it, Paramount Global. Comedy Central spun Colbert off into his own show, the “Colbert Report,” with both words pronounced in the French way for extra pompousness.
On the “Report,” Colbert satirically adopted the persona of a self-righteous Fox “News” anchor, a Pete Hegseth sort of figure. Faced with always being wrong, he opined that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
And that is where I come into the picture as a bit player. I went viral as a commentator on the Iraq War in 2004 and after, a subject in which Americans and the world were deeply interested, and about which as a historian of Iraq I knew something serious. My blog became widely read and I was invited on TV frequently as a commentator, and newspapers solicited my op eds. One of my students at the University of Michigan had a relative who worked at the Colbert Report. That person called me to try to get me on. But for me that was a tricky proposition. Colbert was satire and I didn’t want anyone making fun of the poor Iraqis, even if it was a way of making fun of President George W. Bush and his cronies. So I turned it down. I heard later that Mr. Colbert was deeply annoyed at the rebuff.
But then in 2009 I published Engaging the Muslim World with St. Martin and they booked me on a lot of media to promote it, including Colbert.
And here is my report, from March, 2009, of what happened next. Note my anecdote about the troglodyte shock jock who wanted to “just start killing” all the people in Gaza, apparently including the children, which shocked me at the time as fringe but a version of which has now become the official policy of the Israeli and United States governments.
Ironically, in 2025, the media environment has narrowed so much and the country has lurched so far to the right that neither Colbert nor I is any longer fit for appearing on U.S. television. This is because our 800 some odd billionaires (and mostly they are very odd) back convicted felon and dementia sufferer Trump and his far, far right movement and they also control the country’s media.
So I was on the Colbert Report, hosted by Stephen Colbert at Comedy Central, on Wednesday night, to promote my new book, Engaging the Muslim World.
The clip is up at the Colbert site now [Paramount Global took it down].
Colbert has four Emmys for his comedy writing on the show, and also just won a Producers Guild Award for Television Producer of the Year Award in Live Entertainment/Competition (i.e. he has the esteem of his peers). A talented comedy writer who worked on the Saturday Night Live “Saturday TV Funhouse” cartoons (and sometimes provided voices), and then as a writer and occasional “correspondent” on the Daily Show, like Tina Fey he made the move to performance (and like her his greatest success came in parodying the political Right). To be sure, he did it first.
Colbert’s persona as a pompous, right-wing news anchor has a long genealogy in television comedy. One thinks of Ted Knight’s Ted Baxter character on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Colbert’s special genius lay in recognizing the comedic potential of skewering the Fox Cable News anchors and commentators, the rightwing bullyboys such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. That he is a liberal playing a conservative to a young liberal audience introduces a hall-of-mirrors-like complexity into the comedy.
So after they set me, my wife and my editor and some staffers from Palgrave Macmillan up in the green room in a nondescript building on the edges of Manhattan’s Theater District, the Colbert crew kindly gave me a tour of the studio (I like studios, and sort of collect visits to them). I impudently asked if I could sit at Mr. Colbert’s anchor desk, and the staff kindly said yes:
As I was getting behind the desk I almost tripped on something, and looked down to find a . . . pitchfork. Gee, I thought, this will be a tough interview.
But it turns out that the pitchfork was meant for another purpose, Colbert’s populist proposal to lead the peasants with torches to the AIG [American International Group insurance] headquarters (i.e. the very thing Rush Limbaugh was inveighing against). Colbert’s persona is sometimes more populist than merely conservative.
In our interview, Colbert effectively skewered the Islamophobic schticks of rightwing American media, a la Glenn Beck and other hatemongers. I do a lot of radio and am sometimes on with a shock jock interviewer. In fact, on Wednesday morning I had the misfortune to encounter Chicago radio personality Mancow Muller in a telephone interview on my book. At one point he started shouting, as I remember, “isn’t it time to just start killing them?” and wanted to justify killing and half-starving Gazan children for the sins of Hamas. I don’t know if he believes this crap or he is not all there, but his employer, Talk Radio Network, appears to be among the biggest hatemongers in the United States. A responsible American public would mount advertiser boycotts of this sewage. I’m all for free speech in media and love listening to responsible conservative voices such as those in The American Conservative. But just shouting that it is time to start killing people is sick and actually may eventually get someone killed.
Anyway, after my distasteful encounter earlier that day, I found Colbert’s parody of such individuals positively hilarious.
Interestingly, Colbert revealed that he is taking the show to the Persian Gulf, for a direct encounter with the Muslim world, himself. He was hoping, he said, for an opulent experience in Dubai. I had the sad duty of informing him that Dubai isn’t what it was before the real estate collapse.
The Colbert Report generously gave me a bag full of goodies. These included a Colbert Report shoulder bag (which I will treasure), various flavored waters and snacks, a cosmetic kit that my wife thought well of, and a gift card that allows me to forward $100 to help public schools via DonorsChoose.org which was the best gift of all.
After the show was over, my wife and I had a very nice celebration dinner at Victor’s Cuban Cafe in the Theater District, among my favorites in New York. Afterwards, we wanted to go back to the hotel and catch the show, which airs at 11:30 pm ET. But it then occurred to me that our hotel’s basic cable package did not include Comedy Central. So we asked the manager at Victor’s if we could watch it at the bar as they were closing up, and they kindly agreed. The manager had stories about visits to the restaurant of J-Lo, David Letterman, and other celebrities.
It was a wonderful experience to be on the Colbert Report. Unlike some academics, I watch a lot of television, and don’t think you can understand American society if you don’t. I really think that the Comedy Bloc from 11-12 ET on Comedy Central, of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, is a little space of sanity and reality in American public life. Comedy, satire and parody allow these two very intelligent and perceptive gentlemen to be brutally frank about the foibles of American society. To any extent I could join in that enterprise, it was my privilege.
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