The network tried to bury an interview critical of Trump. Stephen Colbert made it an indictment of the administration’s assaults on the First Amendment.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
(Scott Kowalchyk / CBS via Getty Images)
Just a week after the centibillionaire owner of The Washington Post ravaged its news operations in the service of plutocratic impunity, the news regime installed by the centibillionaire owner of CBS News has said, in essence, “Hold my beer.” After Late Show host Stephen Colbert had scheduled an interview with Democratic Texas state Representative James Talarico, the network’s legal division told him to cancel the segment. The rationale for the move was the same pretext that the Federal Communications Commission cited in opening a ludicrous regulatory investigation into Talarico’s earlier appearance on ABC’s daytime talk show, The View: Featuring a candidate for office during an election cycle without also hosting that candidate’s opponents was a violation of the agency’s equal-time doctrine.
News reports and talk-show appearances have long fallen out of the ambit of equal time, because news consumers benefit from hearing the views of candidates when they’re up for election—the exemption basically holds that viewers of such shows can be expected to act like adults who can discern the difference between public affairs and entertainment fare and straight news coverage. But Brendon Carr, the MAGA hack Donald Trump appointed to head the FCC in his second term, is hell-bent on abolishing these genre distinctions and transforming the enforcement of equal-time regulations to benefit right-wing candidates. He is continuing to stoke the media-persecution mania at the core of Trump’s grievance politics. This debased reasoning led Carr to pressure ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing MAGA theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Even though Carr has yet to float a formal revision of equal-time strictures, the Trump White House’s multifront assault on media independence has advanced to the point where, as Colbert noted in his opening monologue, “my network is already acting as though he had.”
CBS’s lawyers counseled Colbert to refrain not only from airing his Talarico interview but from discussing the decision to yank it on the air. But since CBS announced last year that it’s canceling Colbert’s show in the spring, he invoked the hallowed privilege of the short timer—what are they going to do, fire me?—to target CBS and Carr in his opening monologue and post his interview with Talarico on the show’s YouTube page. (You can watch it here; Colbert’s opening monologue is here.) “You’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC you,” Colbert said to Carr, before rehearsing the agency’s clearly lopsided and self-dealing invocation of the equal-time rule. “You are motivated by partisan purposes yourself,” Colbert continued. “Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on TV because all he does is watch TV.” Colbert also noted that Carr’s equal-time vigilance doesn’t extend to talk radio, which is overrun with right-wing hosts giving interviews to right-wing politicians.
But you don’t need to subject yourself to drivetime AM radio hates to see the damage unfettered MAGA ideology has wrought on our mediasphere—you can just gaze across the wreckage left by Bari Weiss, the laughably unqualified editor in chief of CBS News, whom billionaire nepo baby David Ellison handpicked after Paramount Skydance acquired the network. Just hours before the Colbert fiasco became public, 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper announced that he was quitting the show, ostensibly to spend more time with his family, though this rationale doesn’t extend to the post he’s continuing to hold at CNN. The Occam’s-razor explanation for Cooper’s departure is that he’s fed up with Weiss’s ideological meddling, which deliberately diluted a report on horrific conditions at the El Salvadoran CECOT facility where the Trump administration is warehousing immigrant detainees. (Though CNN may not prove all that safe a harbor for his journalistic integrity—the cable network is potentially next in line to be swallowed up by Skydance as it revives a hostile bid to thwart the Netflix acquisition of CNN’s parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery.)
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Meanwhile, at CBS Evening News, which has become a Fox News doppelgänger under the witless tutelage of its new, Weiss-recruited anchor Tony Dokoupil, senior producer Alicia Hastey also fled journalistic ruination. After she took a buyout from the network’s new corporate masters, she circulated a blistering farewell memo castigating the network’s rightward lurch. Where she had formerly been empowered to produce “segments that aimed to foreground underrepresented perspectives, interviews that challenged conventional wisdom, and efforts to make our journalism more responsive to a skeptical public,” the new CBS News regime has scuttled that newsgathering model. In its place, Hastey wrote, “a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism.… Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations—a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
Hastey could have cited virtually any segment from Dokoupil’s garbage fire of a broadcast as an exhibit for her appraisal of this posture of all-out sycophancy before MAGA power, but the anchor’s refrain closing out a worshipful profile of Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Trump administration’s lawless kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife will likely serve as the epitaph for the network: “We salute you, Marco Rubio.”
That sickening performance also drives home a point Talarico raised in his bumped interview with Colbert: “This is the party that ran against cancel culture…and this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture—the kind that comes from the top. Corporate media executives are selling out the First Amendment to curry favor to corrupt politicians. And any threat to our First Amendment rights is a threat to all our First Amendment rights.”
Over to you, Bari Weiss.