When the Joke Stops Being Funny

 The Late Show, Media Consolidation, and What It Means for Chico

On July 17, 2025, CBS announced The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would end its run in May 2026. The announcement came three days after Colbert publicly called Paramount's $16 million settlement of a lawsuit brought by President Trump "a big fat bribe." The Late Show was, at the time of its cancellation, the highest-rated program in late-night television, averaging 2.42 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025.

CBS stated the decision was purely financial, with no connection to the show's content or performance. Many observers found that explanation difficult to accept at face value.

The Merger in the Room

To understand the timing, it helps to understand the business context. Paramount, CBS's parent company, was in the final stages of an $8 billion merger (yes, billion... with a B) with Skydance Media that required approval from both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC, whose chairman was appointed by President Trump, approved the merger on July 24, and if you're keeping track, that's eight days after the cancellation was announced on air.

In the lead-up to that approval, Skydance's CEO David Ellison met with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and explicitly promised that CBS's editorial decision-making would reflect "the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers." That is a remarkable thing for a news organization's prospective owner to promise a government regulator in order to obtain business approval for a merger.

Following the merger's completion, Paramount acquired The Free Press, a conservative media outlet, for approximately $150 million, and appointed its founder Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The Ellison family, which now controls Paramount, has ties to the current administration that have only grown more visible since the merger closed. 

Ellison attended Trump's 2026 State of the Union as a personal guest of Senator Lindsey Graham. In April 2026, he hosted an event in Washington explicitly titled "honoring the Trump White House," attended by top administration officials and CBS News executives. He is currently pursuing a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would include CNN, with reported assurances to Trump about editorial changes at the network. Eight Democratic senators have formally requested Ellison preserve records related to whether the DOJ and administration provided favorable treatment in the Paramount deal in exchange for commitments about CNN's future coverage. 

None of this proves the cancellation of The Late Show was ordered or requested by anyone outside CBS. What it does show is a media company making a series of decisions — settling a presidential lawsuit, cancelling its most prominent critic of that president, promising ideological balance to a government regulator, and installing a politically aligned editor at its flagship news division — all while seeking a merger requiring  that government's approval. Whether each individual decision was made for business reasons is almost beside the point. The pattern is the story.

This is what is sometimes called complying in advance: making accommodations not because you have been explicitly told to, but because you understand what is required to get what you want. It is basically how the mobsters do things in all the big Mafia movies of the 70s and 80s; the Don doesn't need to explain what he wants done, his enforcers are expected to act without having the tasks spelled out for them. They know what's on the line and what will happen to them if the job isn't done right.

The chilling effect does not require a phone call. It requires only the people making decisions understand the stakes.

What This Means for Chico

Here's where things get a little weird. 

The local broadcast television landscape in the Chico-Redding market is almost entirely controlled by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates KRCR (ABC), KCVU, and several other local stations serving our area. KRCR carries the ABC affiliate for the market and, as of December 2025, also carries the Fox affiliation on a subchannel, which means that two of the major broadcast networks available to local viewers now run through a single Sinclair-owned station. 

Sinclair is one of the largest broadcast groups in the country, with a well-documented history of requiring its local stations to air centrally produced political content regardless of local editorial judgment.

Sinclair and Paramount are separate companies with no ownership connection. But that is precisely the point.

You do not need a single company to own everything in order to end up with a homogenized information landscape. When the largest national broadcast news organization is restructuring its editorial direction under ownership with close ties to the administration, and the dominant local broadcast presence in your market has its own history of top-down political influence, the result for viewers in Chico is the same. 

In the end, there are fewer independent sources of information, and more news shaped by relationships between media owners and the people they cover.

A comedian losing his job is not, by itself, a constitutional crisis. Stephen Colbert will be fine. He jokes he has the option to create an OnlyFans account, and his brand new YouTube account already has over one million subscribers. (That's the start to a very promising influencer career!)

The question is what the circumstances of that cancellation reveal about the broader relationship between government power and the information Americans receive. When a broadcaster's business interests are dependent on government approval, and that government has demonstrated willingness to use regulatory levers against media organizations it dislikes, the independence of that broadcaster is structurally compromised, regardless of whether any explicit pressure was ever applied.

Why It Matters for Voters

A free press is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism by which citizens in a democracy find out what their government is actually doing, as opposed to what it says it is doing. Just as with politicians, what an institution does, and under what pressures it operates, tells you more than what it says about itself.

This does not mean every news organization is corrupt, or every editorial decision is politically motivated. It means media consolidation, regulatory leverage, and the financial entanglement of major broadcasters with the governments that regulate them are conditions worth understanding, and worth asking questions about when you evaluate the news you consume.

In a market like Chico, where broadcast television options are limited and locally owned independent journalism is scarce, that evaluation matters more, not less. Knowing who owns your news, what business interests they are protecting, and what relationships they maintain with the people they cover is not cynicism. It is civic literacy. And civic literacy makes us wiser voters.