What Stephen Colbert's departure tells us: Speak carefully, laugh quietly and don't disrupt

Indian Express

2 days ago

It has been a wild couple of weeks since the news broke that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was being taken off air. American late-night hosts have long built careers mocking the high and mighty – presidents, billionaires, media barons – and I always found that remarkable. Here is the most powerful country in the world, and yet its citizens could flip on the TV at night and watch someone dismantle power with wit and sharpness. That kind of televised dissent is rare in today's world.
And now, it feels like something is shifting.
Colbert's exit is officially being framed as a business decision. Paramount Global, CBS's parent company, cited sustained financial losses of $40-$50 million annually as the reason for axing not just Colbert's show but the entire Late Show franchise. But the timing is suspect. The announcement came just days after Colbert delivered an on-air monologue criticising Paramount's controversial $16 million legal settlement with Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris – a settlement that critics have called a quiet payoff to avoid further scrutiny. In that same week, Paramount was in the final stages of an $8 billion merger with Skydance, a deal that still needed regulatory approval. To put it simply, Colbert's pointed critique came at a politically and financially inconvenient moment for his bosses.
On air, he called it a 'bribe', a corporate retreat cloaked as legal housekeeping. Within a week, CBS announced it was not only ending The Late Show, but also axing the entire franchise.
No replacement, no transition — just a shutdown.
And so, Stephen Colbert — one of the most influential satirical voices in America — is being not-so-quietly phased out.
It's hard to take the company's explanation at face value. The Late Show was the top-rated programme in its slot. But ratings don't matter when you're embarrassing powerful people or making a media giant uncomfortable before a multi-billion dollar merger. Colbert's exit, abrupt and total, feels less like a financial decision and more like a boardroom sacrifice. In that sense, this isn't just about one man losing a show. It's about what gets silenced when business collides with power.
What does this say about freedom of speech today? On paper, Colbert has not been censored. There's been no government ban, no legal gag order, no explicit blacklisting. But freedom of speech is not just about the absence of state control. It's about the presence of cultural and institutional protections that allow criticism, discomfort, and dissent to exist, even thrive, especially when they are inconvenient. Night after night, Stephen Colbert threaded humour with moral clarity, calling out hypocrisy, challenging bigotry, and refusing to treat politics as just another punchline. In a post-truth era, where facts are negotiable and outrage is monetised, his monologues often felt like the closest thing to a conscience mainstream TV had.
Which is precisely why his removal stings.
It reveals a deeper truth about freedom of speech in modern America: You're allowed to speak freely until it costs someone too much money. Or until your words threaten a pending merger. Or until your satire points too directly at the rot in the system funding your airtime.
This is what Jon Stewart called 'fear and pre-compliance' in fierce defence of his friend – corporations acting not under direct pressure, but out of fear of political or financial fallout. In this version of the story, no one needed to shut Colbert down. The network did it for them.
The implications are chilling. If Stephen Colbert, with his platform, ratings, and cultural clout, can be dropped this unceremoniously, what message does that send to others? Speak carefully. Laugh quietly. Don't disrupt.
And it's not just about television. This is about the narrowing of spaces where dissent can survive without being strangled by ad revenue models or sanitised by corporate boards. It's about how easily satire – one of democracy's oldest checks on power – can be dismissed as expendable when it dares to bite the hand that feeds it.
Late-night television, for decades, has functioned as a space where comedians could speak truth to power with a punchline. From Johnny Carson to David Letterman, and later Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, these shows were where satire met civic discourse. They weren't just entertainment, they were a vital pressure valve in democracies, especially during times of political dysfunction. When Donald Trump rose to power, and traditional journalism struggled to keep up with his reality-bending tactics, shows like The Late Show helped Americans make sense of the chaos, or at least laugh through it.
Trump, predictably, celebrated the cancellation, calling it just the beginning. He's now publicly fantasising about the demise of other late-night hosts. Whether that's just bluster or not, the message is unmistakable – dissent has consequences. Stephen Colbert's departure is not the first of its kind, but it may be the most symbolic. It suggests that even a ratings leader is dispensable if his voice becomes a liability.
In May 2026, when Stephen Colbert signs off for the last time with his 'gloves off', he'll do so with millions of fans watching. Some may see it as the natural end of a show. Others will see it for what it is: A warning.
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