CBS’ recent cancellation of the popular The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is yet another case of heavy‑handed political and corporate meddling in the role of media in the US. It occurred just three days after the comedian and talk show host criticised CBS’s parent company Paramount for settling a multimillion‑dollar lawsuit with Trump, with Colbert calling that settlement “a bribe”.

In its announcement, CBS stated it will end The Late Show after May 2026 due to a declining audience, marking the end of a 33‑year run for the live‑audience series.

But, lower Nielsen ratings or not, the timing of Paramount’s move to cancel one of its signature series may itself prove that the decision was about more than profit. It cannot be ignored that within a few days of both moves, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally approved the Skydance‑Paramount merger after months of stalling, an $8bn deal that will add to the mountain of monopolistic moves in US media.

“This is pure cowardice,” David Letterman, The Late Show’s previous host from 1993 to 2015, said of Paramount’s recent decisions to cancel the show and settle the Trump lawsuit.

The US news media’s never‑ending coverage of everything Trump over the past decade and the constant back‑and‑forth over his politics, policies and practices have played a significant role in its decline. As the US lurches ever closer towards autocracy, the Fourth Estate has increasingly taken on the role of stenographer, with its normalisation of lies, gossip, craven policies and corruption as “disinformation” and “misinformation”.

But the age of Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. The combination of constant realignment to ingratiate media corporations with the political class, along with their monopolisation of media in the US over the past 45 years, has simply devastated the field. This retrenchment has severely skewed news coverage and destroyed the idea of a free press.

The landscape of US media began evolving with the gradual deregulation of both media ownership and........

© Al Jazeera