The recent cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s well-known The Late Show by CBS is yet another instance of heavy-handed political and corporate meddling in the US media landscape. The comedian and host made headlines just three days after CBS’s parent company Paramount settled a multimillion dollar dispute with Trump. Colbert referred to the settlement as “a bribe.”
The Late Show will be discontinued after May 2026, according to CBS’ announcement, which would end a 33-year live-audience run.
Whether or not one of Paramount’s pivots was based on lower Nielsen ratings, however, may indicate that the decision was made with more in mind than just profit. After months of stalling, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally approved the $ 8 billion deal that will add to the mountain of monopolistic moves in US media.
David Letterman, the previous host of The Late Show from 1993 to 2015, criticized Paramount’s recent decisions to cancel the show and settle the Trump lawsuit. “This is pure cowardice.
The relentless scrutiny of Trump’s policies, policies, and practices by the US media over the past ten years has had a significant impact on its decline. The Fourth Estate has increasingly taken on the role of stenographer as the US moves closer and closer to autocracy, promoting lies, rumors, lustful policies, and corruption as “misinformation” and “misinformation”
Trump’s age is just the start of the iceberg, though. The media industry has been completely destroyed by the combination of the political class’s constant realignment with media corporations and their monopoly of the media in the US over the past 45 years. The concept of a free press has been severely distorted by this repression and the media.
With the gradual deregulation of both media ownership and editorial freedom in the 1980s, the landscape of US media started to change. In 1987, the FCC voted to end what was once the Fairness Doctrine in US media law, which mandated that multimedia broadcasters broadcast opposing viewpoints on issues of national importance rather than just one viewpoint. After Congress had attempted to codify the doctrine in a bill, President Ronald Reagan had vetoed their request. Over the years, attempts to reestablish the Fairness Doctrine have failed, including the Restore the Fairness Doctrine Act, which was sponsored by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, in 2019. The House floor was never able to vote on that bill.
Many of the remaining rules that protected US media from monopolization and the influence of billionaires and megacorporations were removed in a truly bipartisan effort in the 1990s. Only 16 of 430 votes in the House of Representatives and 5 of 96 in the Senate were “No,” which was the lobbyist-influenced Telecommunications Act of 1996, which passed through Congress with overwhelming support.
The deregulations, which were intended to increase competition between media companies and their multimedia platforms, actually extended media monopoly. Between 1983 and 2015, there were “more than 50” corporations that collectively controlled 90% of the US media market, including books, newspapers, magazines, mobile and cable television, internet, music, movies, and professional athletic teams. Five megacorporations now control 90% of US media, with the exception of CBS and Paramount and Amazon’s enormous foray into streaming services and multimedia productions in the years since.
Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Star, became a key player in the monopolization of US media in all its forms. He merged with the New York Post and founded the tabloid paper Star. The FCC approved the agreement that gave Murdoch the right to purchase 20th Century Fox and acquire Fox broadcast stations in 1985. Due to federal laws at the time restricting foreign ownership of and investment in broadcasting, this occurred after Murdoch became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Murdoch and media executive Roger Ailes founded Fox News with the ironically deceptive slogan “Fair and Balanced” eleven years later, and just months after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Fox News’ decidedly biased far-right stance was deliberate and built solely for profit now that the Fairness Doctrine has been abolished and the need for fair media coverage has been eliminated. The late Ailes’ remark repeatedly in support of Fox News’ approach to news coverage is that “people don’t want to be informed, they want to feel informed.”
Americans have long lost faith in the Fourth Estate as a result of billionaires dictating editorial decisions in major news outlets like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Over the past three decades, “fewer journalists, thinner reporting, and increasingly desperate advertising content” have resulted from monopolisation and the associated business pressures. This trend is telling when combined with the rise of social media as the primary method of news distribution for Americans (54% vs. 50%) and 48%, respectively), and also in tandem with the rise of social media. There are no indications that biased, fact-reduced, and fact-free media coverage will soon stop.
Murdoch’s strategy, which prioritizes profit over fairness every step of the way, helped to fuel this buying frenzy by allowing deregulation to establish a monopoly and usher in the era of fact-free journalism. By the end of the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh, the late president of the United States, was leading the charge with his nationally syndicated The Rush Limbaugh Show. His constant swarm of racism, sexism, queerphobia, and other hyper-masculine talking points became a source of echo for about 15 million listeners over the course of the next 30 years.
Progressive initiatives have frequently failed, despite the fact that center-left radio like Air America made minor inroads in the 2000s. In a media that is increasingly monopolized and has a biased viewpoint, they frequently lack political support and financial backing. When critics saw MSNBC’s purely centrist political news coverage as “liberal” in the “Lean Forward” era,” its executives disputed that MSNBC was the leftist version of Fox News. No, according to Phil Griffin, who ran MSNBC from 2008 to the beginning of 2021. Like Fox News, we don’t “pull out talking points all day.” “Corporations are like sharks,” he said. They simply turn their attention to the money. That’s all they do, according to a former news organization executive. The progressive tabloid Gawker was essentially destroyed by eugenicist tech billionaire Peter Thiel in 2016. Thiel assisted the late wrestler Hulk Hogan in winning a $ 140 million lawsuit against Gawker for the publication of his sex tape, angry that Gawker had outed him as gay in 2007.
It is frequently said that effective journalism accurately captures the events of the world, without bias, and makes every effort to expose the true nature of news events. If this is truly the epitome of good journalism, then US journalism has spent decades looking in the mirror and fracturing it. In 2025, it’s not just that many Americans only believe the news when it fits their personal narrative or that they don’t believe in the media they consume. Many Americans are aware of the fact that the media constantly sells lies, half-truths, and gossip in an unending search for profit, all while ignoring their customers.
In a media world where there is no such thing as a monopolized media world, what is the case with reporting on the spread of autocratic rule, blaming complicity in genocide, or questioning the ethics of billionaires and megacorporations? Anyone in the media who works for fairness and truth is easily liable to lose their job, or worse, even someone with as much power as Stephen Colbert.
