Stephen Colbert's ‘Late Show' was haven for left-wing politicians and journalists
Fox News Digital has counted at least 200 episodes of 'The Late Show' that featured members of the liberal media.
The far-left politics of 'The Late Show' have been facing scrutiny after CBS announced last week that it was pulling the plug on Colbert's program, which will officially wrap up in May 2026.
According to IMDB search results, CNN anchor and '60 Minutes' correspondent Anderson Cooper holds the record with 20 formal guest appearances on 'The Late Show.'
Cooper showed his support for Colbert on Monday in a cameo appearance as part of an audience gag mocking CBS parent company Paramount and President Donald Trump.
Other journalists and hosts who were top 'Late Show' guests included CNN anchor Jake Tapper, with 12 appearances, the 'Pod Save America' Obama bros with 11, MSNBC's Chris Hayes with 10 and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and 'The View' co-host Whoopi Goldberg with eight apiece, per IMDB.
Colbert frequently rolled out the red carpet for his CBS colleagues in the news division for cross-promotion.
John Dickerson has tallied 19 appearances, Gayle King notched 14, Norah O'Donnell has six, and Margaret Brennan has three.
3 Fox News Digital reports that 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' featured left-wing journalists as formal guests for at least 200 episodes.
Scott Kowalchyk/CBS
Several times, the CBS hosts made joint appearances, like King with her 'CBS Morning' colleagues.
Similarly, John Heilemann and Alex Wagner, prominent MSNBC analysts, both made at least ten appearances, thanks in part to their stints hosting the political docuseries 'The Circus' that aired on Showtime, a sister network under the Paramount umbrella.
The late-night CBS host welcomed liberal journalists from rival broadcast networks like ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Jonathan Karl as well as NBC's Savannah Guthrie, Craig Melvin and Jacob Soboroff.
Hosts on CNN and MSNBC, which both leaned into anti-Trump politics throughout Colbert's run, were regulars at the Ed Sullivan Theater.
3 CBS announced last week that 'The Late Show' will end in May 2026.
CBS via Getty Images
'Morning Joe' co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have made four joint appearances, as did Joy Reid before her firing from MSNBC earlier this year.
Nicolle Wallace, Jen Psaki and Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC and Christiane Amanpour of CNN International have each made three appearances.
Other CNN and MSNBC stars, past and present, who've joined Colbert over the years include Brian Stelter, Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Katy Tur, Ari Melber, Kaitlan Collins, Abby Philip, Laura Coates, Van Jones, Donny Deutsch, Audie Cornish, Jim Sciutto and Chris Matthews.
Other notable media figures that have also made 'Late Show' appearances over the years include Katie Couric, Bob Costa, Ana Navarro, Maggie Haberman, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Lowery, Scott Pelley, Lesley Stahl, Ezra Klein, Susan Glasser, April Ryan, Jorge Ramos, John Avlon, Margaret Hoover, Ronan Farrow, Michael Wolff, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
3 IMDB shows that CNN anchor and '60 Minutes' correspondent Anderson Cooper has the most formal guest appearances on the show during Colbert's tenure as host, making a total of 20 appearances.
CBS via Getty Images
Liberals have been outraged over Colbert's shocking cancellation.
Many of them, including Jon Stewart, believe the move was meant to kowtow to Trump and not because of the show's finances as CBS claimed.
But Colbert's show was reportedly losing CBS $40 million a year and that it had been running on a whopping $100 million budget per season.
While the liberal late-night hosts are struggling, Fox News Channel's 'Gutfeld!' averaged 3.1 million viewers through July 20, compared to 1.9 million for CBS' outgoing 'Late Show.'
During that same time period, ABC's 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' averaged 1.5 million, NBC's 'The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon' averaged 1.1 million, and NBC's 'Late Night with Seth Meyers' managed 751,000.
When it comes to the advertiser-coveted demographic of adults aged 25-54, 'Gutfeld!' averaged 398,000 of the viewers most coveted by advertisers, compared to 288,000 for Colbert.
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NBC News
a few seconds ago
- NBC News
A decade of Supreme Court rulings have given states increasingly unfettered power in redistricting
WASHINGTON — In June 2019, the Supreme Court swept aside the idea that federal courts could rein in state lawmakers' power to draw legislative maps designed primarily to entrench their own party's power. The ruling, a 5-4 split along ideological lines with conservative justices in the majority, made it clear that partisan gerrymandering was here to stay, absent states taking matters into their own hands or the unlikely scenario of Congress' stepping in to impose some sort of national ban. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said simply that federal courts had no authority to intervene on the issue, even if it means election outcomes can "seem unjust." With technological advances making it increasingly easy to surgically draw districts to maximize partisan advantages, both Republican and Democratic states have continued the practice. That is now on view in Texas as Republicans plan to redraw congressional maps to further extend their dominance in the state and insulate against possible Democratic gains nationwide in the 2026 midterm elections, which will determine control of the House of Representatives for the final two years of President Donald Trump's term. That has prompted Democrats in California and other states to threaten countermeasures. "This is just a very ugly race to the bottom," said Richard Pildes, an expert in election law at New York University School of Law, who has advocated for reform. With control of the House so finely poised, Texas has the incentive to "squeeze out every district they can," he said. The legal background of redistricting Under the Constitution, state legislatures have the primary role of drawing legislative maps, but Congress has the specific power to intervene should it choose and set rules for how it should be done. States are required to draw new legislative maps after the census that takes place every 10 years. Texas and all the other states have already drawn new maps after the 2020 census. The latest saga was prompted when Gov. Greg Abbott proposed a mid-decade re-draw for overt political gain, urged on by Trump. States are not prohibited from drawing new maps between censuses, but it is rarely done. Texas is "bashing through norms that were keeping folks in check," said Sophia Lin Lakin, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who works on voting rights cases. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in the partisan gerrymandering dispute, there are some restrictions on how states draw districts. Under the Supreme Court's "one person, one vote" precedent, the populations of every district must be similar so the power of each individual voter is not diluted. Another constraint, at least for now, is the landmark Voting Rights Act, a law passed 60 years ago this week to protect minority voters. But the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has weakened that law in a series of rulings. A ruling in 2013 gutted a key provision that required certain states with histories of race discrimination to get approval from the federal government before they change state voting laws, which included the adoption of new district maps. Just last week, the court indicated it could further weaken the Voting Rights Act in a case involving Louisiana's congressional districts. The court said it would consider whether it is unconstitutional, under the 14th and 15th Amendments, for states to consider race in drawing districts intended to comply with the voting law. A ruling along those lines would be "potentially devastating for voting rights," said Lakin, who is involved in the case. The Trump administration has already suggested support for that type of legal argument in a letter it sent to Texas officials suggesting that the current map is unconstitutional because it was drawn along racial lines, partly to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Meanwhile, the current map in Texas is still being challenged in court by civil rights groups that allege it violates the Voting Rights Act. Amid the trend toward partisan line-drawing, some states have undertaken efforts to de-politicize the process by setting up commissions instead of allowing lawmakers to do the job. There are 18 commissions of some type, although only eight of them are truly independent. The Supreme Court narrowly upheld the use of independent commissions in a 2015 ruling. The court's composition has changed since then, meaning it is unclear whether it would reach the same conclusion now. Meanwhile, as California Democrats scramble to try to override their redistricting commission in response to the Texas plan, it may make less political sense for states to set commissions up in future. "It dramatically undermines the incentives to create commissions," Pildes said. At the time of the partisan gerrymandering ruling, liberal Justice Elena Kagan warned of the consequences of the Supreme Court's deciding not to step in over gerrymandered maps in North Carolina and Maryland. 'The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government,' she wrote. 'Part of the Court's role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.'
Vox
a few seconds ago
- Vox
There's only one type of American who still trusts the Supreme Court
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (left) talks with Chief Justice John Roberts on the steps of the Supreme Court following his official investiture at the Supreme Court June 15, 2017, in Washington, DC.A new Gallup poll finds public approval of the Supreme Court falling below 40 percent for the first time in the poll's history. The poll aligns with many others, which have shown public support for the Supreme Court collapsing since Justice Amy Coney Barrett's 2020 confirmation gave Republicans a 6-3 supermajority on the high Court. One of the Gallup poll's most significant, if unsurprising, findings is that there is also an unprecedented partisan gap in public approval of the Court. Republicans give the justices high marks, while the Court is slightly more popular than venereal disease among Democrats: This partisan gap is more or less what any close observer of the justices would predict, given the Court's recent behavior. Last year, the Republican justices ruled that Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution — so broad, in fact, that the GOP justices even determined that Trump may order the Justice Department to prosecute his perceived enemies 'for an improper purpose.' The same justices who treat Trump as the special favorite of the laws, moreover, have also treated prominent liberal litigants as outside the law's protection. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood, for example, the Republican justices effectively repealed a law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their own health providers after some of those patients chose Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider and Republican bête noire. In fairness, not all polls show the Court is currently at its all-time low point. A recent Fox News poll, for example, shows approval of the justices bottoming out in July 2024, the same month that the Republican justices ruled that the leader of their political party has broad immunity from criminal law. Fox's poll shows public approval of the Court rising this July from its post-Trump immunity low. (Although Fox News is closely aligned with the GOP, its polls are well-respected and generally viewed as reliable.) Still, while individual polls disagree about whether the Court is unpopular or historically unpopular, the broader trend of voters losing faith in the Court as it aligns itself more closely with the Republican Party has been apparent in polling data for quite some time. The Supreme Court's partisan turn is a fairly recent development When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the Court had distinct 'liberal' and 'conservative' blocs, but it would not be fair to describe it as partisan. Two Republican appointees, Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter, typically voted with the Court's liberal bloc. Justice Anthony Kennedy, another Republican, voted with the conservative bloc on most issues, but also held moderate views on abortion and frequently supported gay rights. But that era has passed. Obama replaced Stevens and Souter with his own appointees. Trump replaced Kennedy with Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a much more hardline conservative. Now, the best predictor of how each justice will vote in politically charged cases is whether they were appointed by a Democrat or a Republican. In the past, American presidents often paid surprisingly little attention to their justices' ideologies — President Woodrow Wilson, for example, appointed the reactionary Justice James Clark McReynolds largely because he found McReynolds obnoxious and wanted to get the man (who was serving as Wilson's attorney general) out of the cabinet. The two parties, moreover, often didn't hold consistent views on the types of issues that come before the courts. Some of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's justices, for example, were segregationists — a view that put them at odds with the Democratic Party's liberal views on race under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Republican President George H.W. Bush, who appointed archconservative Justice Clarence Thomas, was such an enthusiastic supporter of reproductive freedom when he was in Congress that his nickname was 'Rubbers,' a reference to condoms. Beginning in the Reagan administration, however, the Republican Party started producing lengthy documents laying out what Republicans did and did not believe judges should do. They also worked with ideologically aligned organizations like the Federalist Society to vet potential nominees to ensure that their judges shared the party's vision. Democrats, meanwhile, do not have the same formal structures to evaluate potential Supreme Court nominees, but they've been no less successful in choosing justices who share the Democratic Party's approach to governance. The last Democratic Supreme Court appointee to break with the party on abortion, for example, was Justice Byron White — a Kennedy appointee who joined the Court in 1962. So it is no surprise that, after decades of both parties appointing carefully vetted partisans to the Supreme Court, public approval of the Court now aligns with voters' political party. The American people correctly perceive that the Supreme Court has become a partisan institution, and that perception is now apparent in polling data.
New York Times
a few seconds ago
- New York Times
How the Right Shaped the Debate Over the Sydney Sweeney Ads
To hear Vice President JD Vance tell it, the Democratic Party has a serious Sydney Sweeney problem. 'Did you learn nothing from the November 2024 election?' Mr. Vance asked of the Democrats during a podcast interview last week. 'The lesson they've apparently taken is, 'We're going to attack people as Nazis for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful.'' His comments joined a chorus of Republican and right-wing voices who argued that a new American Eagle ad campaign with Ms. Sweeney, one of Hollywood's top young stars, had stoked left-wing outrage over its slogan: 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.' They claimed that progressives were up in arms over the intentional double-entendre with the word 'genes,' suggesting it was winking at eugenics or white supremacy. In reality, most progressives weren't worked up much at all. Criticism of the ad campaign had come almost entirely from a smattering of accounts with relatively few followers, according to an analysis of social media data by The New York Times. Conversation about the ad did not escalate online or in traditional media until days later, after right-leaning influencers, broadcasters and politicians began criticizing what they described as a wave of progressive outrage. In fact, by the time right-wing users were in an uproar, only a few thousand posts on X mentioned Ms. Sweeney, according to data by Tweet Binder, a social media analytics company. Fewer than 10 percent of those expressed clear criticism of the actress or ad, according to the analysis by The Times, which used artificial intelligence to help flag posts for review. Overall, there were three times as many posts supportive of the campaign and Ms. Sweeney on X as there were posts critical of them in the days after the campaign began, the analysis by The Times showed. Delayed Interest on X Conversation about Sydney Sweeney and her ad campaign did not surge on X until days after the campaign debuted. Excludes reposts. Source: Tweet Binder by Audiense By The New York Times The boiling social media frenzy over the American Eagle campaign has been driven, at least in part, by the public's seemingly insatiable interest in Ms. Sweeney. But it also shows how, on today's internet, a controversy can sometimes be described as widespread when it isn't. Instead, people pushing an agenda can cherry-pick from the tens of millions of posts and videos uploaded to social media every day to make their case. The political right has become particularly adept at this tactic, cognizant of the way that tapping into hot-button cultural issues can stoke popular anger not just against progressive ideas but against the Democratic Party itself. In the case of the American Eagle ads, the one-sided discourse also appears to have provoked an actual debate: Left-leaning criticism of the campaign rose considerably after the topic gained traction on the right. 'Republicans are going to just keep hammering this because they know that they can find 13 teenagers on TikTok to say something crazy and then turn it into a two-week-long news story,' said Ryan Broderick, the author of Garbage Day, a newsletter about internet culture. American Eagle, which has been struggling financially in the face of inflation and sagging consumer spending, started the campaign with Ms. Sweeney on July 23. At the time, Jennifer Foyle, the company's president, described the campaign as a 'winning combo of ease, attitude and a little mischief.' In one spot, Ms. Sweeney, who promotes a number of other brands as well, zips up a pair of jeans while saying, in a voice-over, that 'genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.' She adds, 'My jeans are blue.' Initial reactions were largely apolitical, though some progressives criticized the ad's sexual overtones while some on the right applauded a return to 'traditional advertising' in what they viewed as a step away from more diverse representations. But on the fringes of sites including TikTok and X, some users began suggesting that the campaign had a more subtle and menacing message tied to eugenics: that blond, blue-eyed looks are somehow superior. 'She has good jeans like she has good GENES! hahahaha like in a nazi way!!' stated a July 25 post on X that drew over five million views. The next day, a video on TikTok that also made a comparison to Nazism drew 3.5 million views. Those, however, appeared to be outliers: Nearly three-quarters of posts that were critical of Ms. Sweeney or the ad had fewer than 500 views, data show. Many pro-Trump users amplified the critical posts in reposts and reshares, driving even more attention to posts that would normally reach only a few thousand users. The tide began to shift on July 27, when large right-wing accounts such as Libs of TikTok began reposting critiques of the American Eagle campaign, mocking them as examples of 'triggered' liberals. 'Keep this up Democrats,' posted the account, which is run by a woman named Chaya Raichik and has 4.3 million followers on X. 'This is going to be great for you guys.' Ms. Raichik and another right-wing account shared a video from a left-wing TikTok user who had 70,000 followers on the platform. Their reposts were seen more than 4.4 million times on X, far eclipsing the reach of the original post. Then came the podcasters. Perhaps prompted by the viral success of posts that defended the American Eagle campaign while attacking left-wing viewpoints, popular podcast hosts including Charlie Kirk, Clay Travis and Michael Knowles jumped on the topic, devoting increasing amounts of airtime to what they described as evidence of a 'brain broken' Democratic culture. Elected Republicans soon followed. Sweeney Surges Broadcast media started covering Sydney Sweeney's ad campaign with renewed fervor days after it had debuted. A notable share of the coverage came from Fox News properties. Includes repeat mentions, such as repeat broadcasts. Fox outlets include Fox News, Fox News Radio and its news podcasts. Source: Critical Mention By The New York Times 'Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,' Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, posted on July 29. After reports emerged that Ms. Sweeney had registered as a Republican in Florida last year, President Trump posted to Truth Social that Ms. Sweeney 'has the 'HOTTEST' ad out there' and praised the campaign for not being 'woke.' Absent from the evolving conversation, however, were any elected Democrats condemning the American Eagle spots. 'Has anyone on the left actually attacked the Sweeney ad?' asked a progressive podcaster, Brian Tyler Cohen, who has 600,000 followers on X and 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, in a post last week as articles were circulating about the uproar. Mr. Travis, who has discussed the ads almost every day for the past week on his sports and politics podcast, 'OutKick,' as well as on his nationally syndicated radio show, acknowledged in an interview that elected Democrats had not criticized the ads. But he said the fact that they hadn't forcefully rebutted the complaints about the ads proved that the party was complicit in what he said was a 'woke' culture run amok. 'I haven't seen a single Democrat call out the absurdity,' he said. 'Their silence speaks volumes.' At least one elected Democrat, Representative Eric Swalwell of California, did speak up to defend the ad. In a response to Mr. Cruz, Mr. Swalwell stated on X that 'attacking the Sydney Sweeney ad is dumb.' Yet his post drew only 60,000 views, compared with 1.2 million for Mr. Cruz's post on the ad. Ms. Sweeney has not publicly commented on the campaign, and American Eagle has also stayed largely out of the fray, save for an Instagram post late last week that said the campaign 'is and always was about the jeans.' At least in the short term, all the attention hasn't hurt the brand: American Eagle shares are up nearly 26 percent since the campaign began. The New York Times collected more than 4,000 posts from X mentioning 'Sydney Sweeney' or alternative spellings of her name from July 24 and July 25, 2025. Those posts were reviewed by an artificial intelligence tool to mark them as critical or supportive of the ad campaign and Ms. Sweeney, from a scale from 0 to 10. Flagged posts with a score of 5 or higher were then manually reviewed by The New York Times and used to calculate the share of posts that were critical or supportive.
