settling a lawsuit with U.S. President Donald Trump<\/a> over a 60 Minutes\u00a0story.<\/p>\n“I am offended,” Colbert said in his monologue on Monday night. “I don’t know if anything \u2014 anything \u2014 will repair my trust in this company. But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”<\/p>\n
Colbert said the technical name in legal circles for the deal was “big fat bribe.”<\/p>\n
Paramount and CBS executives said in a statement that 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.”<\/p>\n
Colbert winning his time slot<\/p>\n
The most recent ratings from Nielsen show that Colbert is winning his time slot, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. It also said his late-night show was the only one to gain viewers so far this year.<\/p>\n
And this week, The Late Show\u00a0was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show for the sixth time. It also won a Peabody Award in 2021.<\/p>\n
The news of the show being cancelled was also announced in a press release sent from CBS with a link to a clip of Colbert’s announcement on Instagram.<\/p>\n
The comedian and TV personality began by telling the audience he was sharing something he learned the night before: “Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending The Late Show in May … it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”<\/p>\n
Colbert’s “bribe” comment referred to\u00a0the pending sale of Paramount to Skydance Media, a deal that needs Trump administration approval.<\/p>\n
Critics of the $16-million US deal that ended Trump’s lawsuit over the newsmagazine’s editing of its interview last fall with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggested it was primarily to clear a hurdle to that sale.<\/p>\n
Colbert followed Jon Stewart’s attack of the Trump settlement a week earlier. Stewart works for Comedy Central, also owned by Paramount.<\/p>\n
Colbert took over The Late Show\u00a0from David Letterman in 2015<\/a>, after becoming a big name in comedy and news satire working with Stewart on The Daily Show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CBS is axing The Late Show With Stephen Colbert\u00a0in May 2026, the host told an audience at a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-4198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}