FCC Chair Brendan Carr joined the chorus of conservatives commenting on CBS’s cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, dismissing the backlash as politically motivated outrage.
“The partisan left’s ritualist wailing and gnashing of teeth over Colbert is quite revealing,” Carr wrote Tuesday morning on X. “They’re acting like they’re losing a loyal DNC spokesperson that was entitled to an exemption from the laws of economics.”
Carr, a Trump appointee to the FCC who rose to chair at the start of the president’s second term, is not the first federal official to weigh in. That distinction belongs to his boss. On Friday, Donald Trump celebrated Colbert’s cancellation with a gloating post on Truth Social: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.
Trump went on to take swipes at other late-night critics, predicting that Jimmy Kimmel “is next,” praising Greg Gutfeld as “better than all of them combined,” and again mocking NBC’s Jimmy Fallon. (He doubled down on his comments this morning, prompting a swift reaction from at least one of the Jimmys.)
As LateNighter has reported, the backlash over CBS’s move has intensified in the days since the network announced Colbert’s cancellation last Thursday. The Writers Guild of America has accused Paramount of “bribery,” and online petitions on Change.org and other platforms have drawn more than 200,000 signatures.
CBS maintains the decision to cancel The Late Show was “purely a financial decision,” claiming the show sustained $40 million in losses this year, a number Colbert appeared to dispute in one of several defiant monologues across late night last night. But with its parent company’s merger said to be in the final stages of winning approval from Trump’s FCC, and CBS having recently settled with the president’s in his widely perceived longshot suit against 60 Minutes, it’s hard not to draw a direct line between Colbert’s frequent criticism of Trump and the timing of his cancellation.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
