BORN TO RERUN: Springsteen Claims CBS Has No Idea What America Is About In Ode To Colbert.
On Wednesday’s penultimate episode of CBS’s The Late Show singer Bruce Springsteen delivering his ode to host Stephen Colbert where he declared that the show is going away because President Trump can’t take a joke and because Paramount’s leaders “feel they need to kiss his ass.” Earlier, on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel sang a similar tune when he declared that they should be ashamed of themselves, even if they are not.
Before launching into his anti-Trump and anti-ICE song “Streets of Minneapolis,” Springsteen gave his ode to Colbert, “I am here in support tonight for Stephen, because you’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we got a president who can’t take a joke. And because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his ass* to get what they want. So, these are— Anyway, Stephen, these are small-minded people, they got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about. This is for you.”
To be fair, Colbert isn’t the first CBS employee to think he’s being taken off air because “the president can’t take a joke.” As Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in their 1986 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live:
CBS canceled the Smothers Brothers in June of 1969, five months after Richard Nixon became President. The reason the network gave was that one of their shows had been turned in after the deadline stipulated in their contract, but Tommy Smothers, Mason Williams, Rob Reiner, and Steve Martin believe to this day the cancellation was politically motivated. “Nixon came in and we were off,” Smothers said. “We were thrown off the air because of our viewpoint on Vietnam.” They were also thrown off, Smothers adds, “because we had no ally in high places” at CBS. That was a key mistake that Lorne Michaels, six years later, would not repeat.
* Earlier: NBC Miscasts CBS Ownership as Partisan Actor as Colbert Eulogies Begin.
CHLOE MELAS: CBS was recently acquired by Skydance Media, whose owner David Ellison is a prominent Trump supporter. CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision and not related in any way to the show’s performance. But that statement doesn’t ring true to everyone. Brian Lowry is a media veteran reporter.
BRIAN LOWRY: There was a sense the studio was eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.
The idea of Ellison as “prominent Trump supporter” makes for good narrative ahead of Colbert’s cancellation. But it simply isn’t true. As our own Brent Baker noted, in 2024 Ellison donated $929,000 to the Biden Victory Fund. AS CNBC noted, this was “the largest recorded contribution that the Skydance Media CEO ever made to a federal candidate.” Not very MAGA. Also, not very accurate.
The Ellison MAGA rebrand is an important element in the ongoing canonization of late-night comics to Resistance™ sainthood. In Colbert’s particular case this narrative is useful inasmuch as it helps brush off the financial reality of the show as a key element of its cancellation.
It doesn’t help matters that Colbert’s nightly audience of about 2.75 million viewers have an average age that’s not far off from Springsteen’s, and the show was losing CBS $40 million per year.
UPDATE: Colbert’s demise, by the numbers.