White House Communications Director Steven Cheung called Stephen Colbert "a sad and pathetic excuse for a human being" in a post on X Thursday, delivering a very public send-off as the late-night host navigates his final weeks on CBS.
The 61-year-old Colbert is winding down a run that CBS itself decided to end. The network canceled The Late Show in July, a week before the merger between David Ellison's Skydance and Paramount was approved by the FCC. Its last episode is scheduled to air on May 21.
According to Breitbart, the cancellation was called a "financial decision." Whatever the internal math, the external product had long since stopped resembling entertainment.
Cheung's broadside wasn't subtle, but it didn't need to be. Colbert spent years converting a legacy comedy franchise into a nightly Democratic fundraising pitch dressed up with a house band and audience applause. The Late Show under his stewardship became less a talk show than a catechism for progressive anxieties, and the ratings reflected the narrowing audience that remained interested in the sermon.
Even the entertainment press has started to notice the smell. A Variety column by Daniel D'Addario offered a telling observation:
"The endless bouquets being tossed Colbert's way have started to make the studio smell a bit cloying."
When Variety, not exactly a right-wing outlet, starts gagging on the farewell coverage, you know the canonization effort has gotten out of hand.
There was a time when late-night television operated on a simple contract with the audience: be funny first, be political second, and never mistake your monologue for a moral mandate. Johnny Carson needled presidents of both parties without turning his desk into a pulpit. Letterman could be acidic, but he was an equal-opportunity cynic. The audience tuned in to laugh, not to be sorted into political categories.
Colbert broke that contract. Not by being liberal, which late-night hosts have always leaned, but by making liberalism the entire product. The comedy became secondary to the cause. Applause replaced laughter. Agreement replaced surprise. The show stopped trying to be funny to everyone and started performing for a specific tribe.
That's a choice. But it's not the choice the franchise was built on, and it's not one that aged well commercially.
Critics will ask why a White House communications director would spend time taking shots at a departing talk show host. The answer is straightforward: the cultural battlefield matters, and Cheung clearly understands that.
For years, late-night hosts operated as an unaccountable messaging arm of the Democratic Party. They set narratives, framed Republicans as villains, and did it all under the protective cover of "it's just comedy." Anyone who objected was told they couldn't take a joke. Meanwhile, the jokes only ever cut in one direction.
Calling it out isn't punching down. It's refusing to let the entertainment-industrial complex pretend it's neutral while functioning as opposition media with a laugh track.
CBS framed the cancellation as a financial decision, and there's no reason to doubt the math. Late-night television has been hemorrhaging viewers for years, and the economics of maintaining a nightly show with a full staff, a studio, and a host salary have become harder to justify as audiences fragment across streaming platforms, podcasts, and social media.
But the financial erosion and the creative erosion aren't separate problems. They're the same problem. When you shrink your audience to only the people who agree with you politically, you lose everyone else. And "everyone else" turns out to be a lot of people.
The Late Show didn't die because television changed. It died because it stopped being television and started being content for a political subculture.
Colbert's final episode airs May 21. Between now and then, expect a parade of Democratic politicians, sympathetic journalists, and fellow travelers taking their victory laps on his couch. The farewell coverage will be thick with tributes to his "courage" and "voice."
What it won't include is any honest accounting of what happened to the institution he inherited. The Late Show was once appointment television for America. Colbert made it appointment television for a faction.
Steven Cheung said what millions of viewers had already concluded with their remotes. CBS just took longer to get the message.
