Lying Weasels
What the end of Stephen Colbert's Late Show tells us about who is allowed to speak on American television
The man who built The Late Show, the man who originated the 11:35 franchise on CBS in 1993 and ran it for twenty-two years before he handed it to Stephen Colbert, was asked why the network was retiring it. David Letterman said: “They’re lying. They’re lying weasels.”
That is the sentence to start with. Not for its careful argument, but because the man who said it knows the building. He knows the executives. He knows what the show cost and what it returned. He knows what a structurally declining advertising market looks like and what a corporate cover story looks like, and he can tell the difference. Letterman walked out to the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater with Colbert one Thursday in May 2026, and the two of them threw an office chair and a cake reading “The Late Show 1993–2026” off the building. That is a man who knows what he saw.
The corporate story is that Stephen Colbert’s show ended for one reason: late-night television is an unprofitable business,s and The Late Show could no longer cover its costs. The corporate story is true on the surface and a lie in its implications. Late-night television is unprofitable; that part is real. The aggregate linear advertising spend in the genre fell by roughly half between 2018 and 2024, from around $439 million to about $220.6 million, and the trend is unlikely to reverse. But the highest-rated show in a declining business is not the show you retire ten months in advance of the end of a contracted run. The highest-rated show is the one you migrate. You move it to streaming. You shrink the band, you cut a writer, you produce four nights instead of five. What you do not do is retire the franchise.
What Paramount did was retire the franchise. And the timing of when they did it is the part that the corporate story cannot explain.
The Week That Cannot Be Explained Without the Merger
Here is the sequence. On July 1, 2025, Paramount paid $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over the 60 Minutes edit of his opponent’s October 2024 campaign interview. The money was earmarked for Trump’s future presidential library. There was no apology. Two senior CBS News executives had already resigned in protest over the contemplated payment.
On July 14, 2025, Stephen Colbert came back from a scheduled hiatus and devoted his opening monologue to the settlement. He called the parent corporation’s payment a “big fat bribe.” He named the merger pending before the Federal Communications Commission. He named the reason a sitting president might want a network to please him.
On July 17, 2025, three nights later, CBS announced that The Late Show was canceled. The network said it was a “purely financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” and that it was not related in any way to “other matters happening at Paramount.”
On July 24, 2025, seven days after the cancellation announcement and ten days after Colbert called his parent company’s payment to the president a bribe on national television, the Federal Communications Commission voted two to one to approve Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. The dissenting commissioner, Anna M. Gomez, wrote on the record that the merger approval was “a dark chapter in a long and growing record of abuse that threatens press freedom in this country” and a “direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.”
Three weeks. Settlement, bribe monologue, cancellation, merger approval. The cancellation lands at the geometric center of that sequence, and the corporate story is that the four events have nothing to do with each other.
I do not believe Paramount. I do not believe the network’s communications department. I do not believe the trade-press friends-of-the-house who carried the leaked $40 million figure into the next news cycle without naming a source. I believe Letterman.
The Math That Does Not Math
The $40 million figure is what you need to understand to grasp how the cover story works. The day after the cancellation, two trade outlets ran nearly identical pieces citing anonymous sources who said The Late Show was losing $40 million a year. By the end of the week, the number had grown to $50 million in one of the sourcing trees and stayed at $40 million in the other. The figure spread. Within seventy-two hours, it was anchoring sympathetic coverage of Paramount’s decision as a regrettable but inevitable response to inescapable economics.
No one would put a name on it. The fact-checking site Snopes asked the reporters who broke the figure where it came from and was told “multiple anonymous sources with knowledge of the show’s finances.” The policy organization Public Knowledge, which has been thinking about media economics for twenty-five years, pointed out the obvious: in 202,5 the financial picture of a late-night show is not just linear advertising revenue. It is YouTube monetization, clip distribution on Paramount’s own streaming platform, and affiliate fees that are allocated to the program by formulas the public never sees. The $40 million number, as constructed, almost surely counted only one of those revenue streams. Jimmy Kimmel, who runs the same kind of show at the same kind of network and knows the math, said it directly: “The idea that Stephen Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical.”
Colbert himself, after the leak, said it on air: “Over the weekend, somebody at CBS followed up their gracious press release with a gracious anonymous leak, saying they pulled the plug on our show because of losses pegged between $40 million and $50 million a year. $40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million. But where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh yeah.”
The arithmetic he was doing on stage was not a joke. The settlement was $16 million. The loss leak was $40 million. The gap is $24 million, the actual number a TV executive might recognize as a structural deficit in a late-night program in 2025. The leak was the cover story, and Colbert showed his audience how it was assembled.
The show was, as of this writing, the highest-rated late-night program on American broadcast television for nine consecutive seasons. It has held its time slot in the eighteen-to-forty-nine advertising demographic since 2019. In September 2025, with the cancellation announcement already on the books, it won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, the first time The Late Show franchise had taken that prize. You cancel that show in July of the year it wins the Emmy. You retire that franchise ten months before the contracted run ends. You spend three weeks watching the host call the parent company’s payment to a sitting president a bribe, and then you tell the audience the decision is purely financial.
The math does not math. Letterman knows it does not math. So does everyone who watched it happen.
The Price of a License
The merger is the through-line. Everything else is decoration on the merger.
