
Famously woke TV star's very surprising take on Steven Colbert's firing after star was axed over losing $40m a year
'Also, no, I'm sorry, it does not fit the narrative, but Stephen Colbert was not fired because of Trump,' Olbermann, more than a decade after his own MSNBC ouster, said in a video posted to both X and Bluesky late Sunday.
'Do not give Trump credit for that,' he added.
'They may make it look like it is to please Trump but the economic factors are far more significant than anything else,' the ex-Countdown with Keith Olbermann anchor explained.
He said there was 'one unanswerable reason' that proved Colbert was not fired because of the conservative and CBS parent Paramount's long-in-limbo sale to Skydance Media that requires federal approval.
'We've seen this before, you've just forgotten that it happened,' Olbermann, 66, added - alluding to MSNBC's cancellation of Phil Donahue's 'Donahue' in 2002 for what ended up being low viewership.
At the time, however, an internal memo leaked to the press stating execs' desire for Donahue to be fired for his opposition to the the US invasion of Iraq, fueling speculation the newsman's firing was for other reasons.
Drawing parallels that appeared to suggest CBS is playing a PR game, Olbermann, 66, pointed to Colbert's show's astonishing lack of profitability.
THANKS, TRUMP!
THE TRUMPSTEIN SCANDAL will now never die - because you sued Rupert, you moron
And, sorry, no, there's one inarguable fact that proves Colbert WASN'T cancelled to appease Trump
GET THE NEW COUNTDOWN PODCAST: https://t.co/i7iBXBS9AC pic.twitter.com/CIvIWjPqsz
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) July 21, 2025
It was pegged this past Friday as being somewhere in the ballpark of negative $40million annually by Puck journalist Matthew Belloni, after ten years on the air.
'If they are silencing him, why have they decided to keep him on TV for the next ten months?' Olbermann asked on the Monday edition of his podcast, which bears the same name as his old MSNBC show that aired from 2003 to 2011.
'This is the Phil Donahue cancellation all over again. It works to CBS's corporate advantage to make it look like they are sucking up to the psycho,' he continued, suggesting C-Suiters back then purposely leaked the correspondence at a time where opposition to the budding was was not very popular.
'Sorry. This is the least of the reasons,' Olbermann added, putting to bed what he put as 'the almost-universally accepted premise that CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert solely to appease Trump.'
'I understand this busts the narrative and reduces our ability to suffer as martyrs,' he said Monday.
'Sorry. That's not what happened here,' he said in a separate Twitter post over the weekend. 'If it had, they wouldn't be keeping him on until next MAY.'
Olbermann offered his opinion as politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren continue to question whether CBS's decision to cancel 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ' was at all linked to Paramount Global's merger with Skydance Media
Colbert, 61, is one the most prominent of critics of the conservative, even amongst a crowded field of left-leaning late night hosts.
He is also at the top of that heap ratings-wise, making his ouster seemingly sudden - and to some, uncalled for.
The fact he took a swipe at his Paramount bosses on-air - for accepting what he presented as a 'big fat bribe' from the administration - just days ago further fueled the speculation.
The parties reached a $16 million settlement in a suit filed by Trump earlier this month - a sum only slightly more than the $15 million Colbert is said to earn annually.
In his piece for Puck Belloni outlined how The Late Show - which costs $100m a year to produce - has seen its advertiser revenue slump drastically even in the last three years, making it harder to pull Colbert's show out of the red.
Late night shows in general have slumped in profitability as viewers shun the format in favor of streaming services or other means of media.
Colbert was reported to be 'not angry, actually' about news of his cancelation, Puck reported - revealing how the host was chatting with his staff in a 'matter-of-fact' way before Thursday's show, shortly after finding out himself.
Moreover, Paramount co-C.E.O. George Cheeks was reportedly the one to pull the trigger on the cancellation - not Skydance CEO David Ellison or the former NBCU exec to serve as the new company's CEO once the merger is finished, Jeff Shell.
Trump, meanwhile, celebrated the news of the show's cancellation last week as it spread, furthering the idea he played a part.
'Sorry. That's not what happened here,' Olbermann wrote in a separate Twitter post over the weekend. 'If it had, they wouldn't be keeping him on until next MAY'
'I absolutely love that Colbert' got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings," he wrote in a Friday Truth Social post.
'I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert.'
Colbert holds the top spot in his hour, with an average of 2.417 million across 41 first-run episodes. Colbert took over as host in September 2015, after Letterman launched the program in 1993.
Second-best Jimmy Kimmel Live! takes in an average of 1.772 million viewers, for reference.
As for Olbermann, he left MSNBC in 2011, months after a scandal that saw him suspended for donating money to Democratic candidates who would go on to appear on his show.
The following January, Olbermann announced his departure from the network, which said in a statement that it had ended its contract with Olbermann. No further explanation was offered.
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It went: 'We will all go together when we go/ What a comforting fact that is to know/ Universal bereavement, an inspiring achievement/ Yes we will all go together when we go.' By 1957 he was performing at Carnegie Hall. Lehrer's fame reached Britain that year, when Professor JR Sutherland, awarding an honorary music degree to Princess Margaret from the University of London, let it be known that she was a fan of his music. Talk of his songs spread through university papers and record shops, prompting the BBC to ban most of them from the airwaves the following year. In 1959 he recorded a second album, More of Tom Lehrer, and sold out several venues in the United Kingdom. Yet it was at this moment that he began to tell his friends he wanted to stop performing. He had never gone out of his way to seek fame. At Harvard, once inundated with invitations to perform at parties, he had doubled his fee. The number of invitations halved, which suited him just fine. At the end of 1959, having toured Australia, and the UK once more, he decided to let his records earn his living for him, and return to Harvard to try to finish his PhD. He soon concluded, however, that he had nothing original to offer academia, and gave up on the PhD in 1965. He continued to dabble with songwriting, submitting tapes of his music to That Was the Week That Was — a precursor to Saturday Night Live — and releasing a third album, That Was the Year That Was. But it tired him to tour the world, playing the same songs over and over, and he all but gave it up. On a short tour of Scandinavia in 1967 he joked that all of his songs were 'part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life, namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits', but it seemed that experiment had reached its conclusion. It was not only out of weariness that he retreated from the limelight, but out of a sense that popular culture had left him behind. His brand of dissent — droll, insouciant, recognisably an undergraduate parlour game — seemed an anachronism to the earnest and righteous rebels of the counterculture. About them he joked, 'It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee house or a college auditorium and come out in favour of the things everybody else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.' Contrary to a biographical note on one of his LPs, Thomas Andrew Lehrer was not 'raised by a yak, by whom he was always treated as one of the family', but born in Manhattan in 1928, the son of Morris Lehrer, a non-practising Jew and necktie manufacturer whose Gilbert and Sullivan records he would listen to constantly, and Anna (née Waller). He began piano lessons at the age of eight, and spent the summers of his boyhood at Camp Androscoggin in Maine, where he bumped into a younger boy whose music he would later idolise: Stephen Sondheim (obituary, November 27, 2021). Educated at Horace Mann, a private high school in the Bronx, Lehrer skipped three years to keep himself amused. His application to Harvard took the form of a poem, the last stanza of which ran: 'But although I detest/ Learning poems and the rest/ Of the things one must know to have 'culture',/ While each of my teachers/ Makes speeches like preachers/ And preys on my faults like a vulture/ I will leave movie thrillers/ And watch caterpillars/ Get born and pupated and larva'ed/ And I'll work like a slave/ And always behave/ And maybe I'll get into Harvard.' He chose to study mathematics, judging that English involved too much reading and chemistry too much grubbing around in foul-smelling laboratories. Once there he began writing scurrilous songs with which to entertain his peers, and surrounded himself with pranksters who would later become eminences in their respective fields: Philip Warren Anderson, who won the Nobel prize in physics; Lewis Branscombe, who became the chief scientist at IBM, and David Robinson, who became the executive director of the Carnegie Corporation. In 1951 he staged the Physical Revue (a play of words on the Physical Review, a scientific publication), a musical drama incorporating 21 of his songs. Invitations to perform at parties poured in, and steadily he acquired a following. By 1954 he was selling records from the second floor of his house, and working as a defence contractor to avoid being conscripted. Despite his best efforts, the following year he was drafted into the Defence Department's cryptography division, which would later become the National Security Agency. He maintained that his only contribution to the NSA was a way to get around its prohibition against staff drinking alcohol at parties — jelly vodka shots. Lehrer gave his last public performance for many years at a fundraiser for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972. Looking for a sunny climate and a quieter life, he began teaching a course in musical theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He would later teach mathematics there too. It was tacitly understood in his classes that nobody was to mention his career as a performer. Despite his on-stage effervescence he was a deeply reticent man, whose friends hardly got a glimpse into his private life. Once asked whether he had a wife or children, he replied 'not guilty on both counts'. Lehrer claimed that he stopped writing satire partly because 'things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.' Indeed, he famously said a year after he retired from performing that 'political satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'. Having relinquished fame so flippantly, he affected to care little about his legacy. When one would-be biographer came knocking, he rebuffed his offer to write his life story, but gave him the original recordings of his second album as though they were worthless to him. He felt no need to give an answer to those who wondered why one of the great lyricists of the 20th century would seem so indifferent to the fate of his own art. In 2020 he put his songs in the public domain. Yet as a younger man he did claim to feel a degree of emotional investment in the reception of his work, saying:'If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.' Tom Lehrer, musical satirist, was born on April 9, 1928. He died on July 27, 2025, aged 97