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 the scope of editorial freedom in the 1980s. After 40 years of what was once the Fairness Doctrine in US media law (requiring multimedia broadcasters to air opposing views on topics of national importance, not just one perspective), the FCC voted to abolish the requirement in 1987. This came after Congress had failed to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of their attempt to codify the doctrine in a bill. Attempts to re‑establish the Fairness Doctrine have failed over the years, including the Restore the Fairness Doctrine Act that the now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard sponsored in 2019. That bill never made it to the House floor for a vote.
In a truly bipartisan effort during the 1990s, many of the remaining regulations that protected US media from monopolisation and the influence of billionaires and mega‑corporations were dismantled. The lobbyist‑influenced Telecommunications Act of 1996 made its way through Congress with overwhelming support, with only 16 “No” votes out of 430 in the House of Representatives, and five voting “No” out of 96 in the Senate.
The deregulations, intended to foster more competition between media corporations and their multimedia platforms, actually did the opposite by extending media monopolisation. Between 1983 and 2015, the number of corporations that collectively owned 90 percent of the entire US media market fell from “more than 50 to just six companies”, including books, newspapers, magazines, mobile and cable television, internet and music, films and professional athletic teams. In the years since, between Viacom’s ownership of CBS and Paramount and Amazon’s huge foray into streaming services and multimedia productions, five megacorporations now control 90 percent of all US media.
The Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch became a key figure in the monopolisation of US media in all its forms, buying stakes in the New York Post and founding the tabloid paper Star. In 1985, the FCC approved the deal that allowed Murdoch to buy 20th Century Fox and acquire Fox broadcast stations. This occurred after Murdoch had become a naturalised US citizen, as federal regulations at that time limited foreign ownership of and investment in broadcasting. Eleven years later, and just months after the Telecommunications Act of 1996’s passage, Murdoch and media executive Roger Ailes founded Fox News under the ironically deceptive slogan “Fair and Balanced”. With the Fairness Doctrine gone and the need to provide balanced media coverage removed, Fox News’ decidedly biased far‑right slant was deliberate, built solely for profit. “People don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed,” the late Ailes apparently said more than once in justifying Fox News’ approach to news coverage.
In recent years, with billionaires buying major news outlets like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal and dictating editorial decisions, Americans have long lost trust in the Fourth Estate. Monopolisation and the business pressures that have come with it have led to “fewer journalists, thinner reporting, and increasingly desperate advertising content” over the past three decades. Combined with the rise of social media over television and internet media sites as the number one way Americans get their news (54 percent vs 50 percent and 48 percent, respectively), this trend is telling. There are no signs that monopolisation and biased, fact‑reduced and fact‑free media coverage will stop any time soon.
Murdoch’s approach of using deregulation to build a monopoly and usher in the age of fact‑free journalism helped set off this buying frenzy, with profit prioritised over fairness every step of the way. By the end of the 1980s, the reign of conservative and far‑right radio talk shows had begun, with the late Rush Limbaugh leading the pack with his nationally syndicated The Rush Limbaugh Show. His constant barrage of racism, sexism, queerphobia and other hyper‑masculine talking points became an echo chamber for about 15 million listeners for the next 30 years.
Although centre‑left radio programming like Air America made minor inroads in the 2000s, progressive ventures have often fizzled out. They have frequently lacked sufficient financial support and political protection in an increasingly monopolised and ideologically skewed media world. At the height of MSNBC’s “Lean Forward” days, when critics saw its merely centrist political news coverage between 2010 and 2016 as “liberal”, its executives denied MSNBC was the leftist equivalent of Fox News. Phil Griffin, who ran MSNBC from 2008 through early 2021, once said, “No. We don’t put out talking points all day” like Fox News. “Corporations are … like sharks. They just move toward the money. That’s all they do,” one former executive for the news organisation said. In 2016, eugenicist tech billionaire Peter Thiel essentially destroyed the progressive tabloid Gawker. Furious that Gawker had outed him as queer in 2007, Thiel helped the late wrestler Hulk Hogan win a $140m lawsuit against Gawker for its publication of his sex tape.
It is often said that good journalism reflects the happenings of the world like a mirror, without bias and with every effort to expose the truth behind news events. If this is truly the definition of what makes good journalism, then US journalism has been staring into a mirror with a multitude of fractures for decades. In 2025, it is not just that many Americans do not believe in the media they consume or only believe the news when it fits their personal narrative. Many in the US know that the nation’s media regularly peddles lies, half‑truths and gossip in a never‑ending search for easy profit, all while dumbing down their consumers.
Reporting on the spread of autocratic rule, calling out complicity in genocide, or interrogating the ethics of billionaires and mega‑corporations in a monopolised media world? Any efforts towards fairness and truth can easily cost anyone in the media their job, or worse, even someone as influential as Stephen Colbert.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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