The End of Colbert's Show Signals Trouble
One of the first signs of authoritarianism is headwinds against comedians
You can measure a society’s political freedom by how openly comedians are able to mock or satirize the government. CBS’s decision to silence Stephen Colbert, announcing the impending end of the venerable The Late Show, is another incipient sign of trouble in the United States.
History, including our troubled times, is replete with examples of authoritarian leaders who are remarkably bereft of a sense of humor. Trump’s own sense of humor, at least in public, tends mostly toward crass mockery of others, in the mold of schoolyard bullies.
His tolerance of others’ mockery of him, on the other hand, is non-existent.
Colbert has gotten under Trump’s skin. Last year, Trump called him “a complete and total loser,” posting on Truth Social that “…he is VERY BORING, and his show is dying… .” The show, by the way, tops all his network competition. Trump urged CBS to “terminate his contract” and replace him with someone “right off the street…for FAR LESS MONEY.”
Not surprisingly, Trump was thrilled at the news. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” he gushed on Friday.
Democratic leaders need a thick skin. The slings and arrows of satirists sting, but that’s how it’s supposed to work in open societies with free speech, where no one, certainly not elected leaders, is immune from criticism. Colbert has built a decade-long archive of mercilessly fileting the president, imitating and ridiculing him, to the delight of millions of viewers.
As Trump worked to dismantle government agencies just after returning to the White House, Colbert described him as “a chimp with a chainsaw.” Earlier, recalling the underworld protagonist of Breaking Bad, he said Trump is like Walter White, but whiter.
Trump hasn’t gone nearly as far as, say, the now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. In 2011, at the start of the pro-democracy uprising in Syria, the country’s best-known cartoonist, Ali Ferzat published a drawing of Assad hitching a ride with Libya’s dictator Muammar Gadaffi, who had just been overthrown.
Shortly after the cartoon came out, Assad sent his goons to rough up the satirist. The masked men beat him, broke his hands, and left him to bleed on the side of the road.
Cartoonists around the world responded with a barrage of drawings defiantly highlighting the persistence of humor as a curb against tyranny.
Another humorless autocrat is Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who, not content with suppressing dissent at home, demanded in 2016 that Germany prosecute a comedian who had written a satirical poem about him.
Comedian Jan Boehmermann appeared in a late-night show on German TV reading a poem decrying Erdogan’s intensifying crackdown on the opposition: “…repressing minorities, kicking Kurds and slapping Christians while watching child porn.” Erdogan had already demanded that another satire about him, a song aired on the comedy show extra3, be removed.
Trump has done nothing like Russian President Vladimir Putin, who took office back when the Russian people thought they were building a democracy.
Under Boris Yeltsin, in the 1990s, satire flourished, but not for long. One of the signs that democracy was in trouble came when Putin moved to shut down the private network NTV, which aired a show with a puppet that made fun of the president.
Here’s an episode, with subtitles in English for your enjoyment.
Russian comedians were arrested and satire became dangerous. Today, humor on government-controlled media steers clear of Putin, his clique, and politics in general.
It’s important to note that Colbert, the most incisive of the comedic critics of the president, was not put in jail, he was not beaten up, indicted, expelled, or blacklisted. This was a pre-emptive decision by his corporate masters, who claimed it had nothing to do with Trump’s dislike for the standup host. They maintain it was purely a business decision, as late night shows are becoming less profitable than they used to be.
It's difficult, however, to give CBS the benefit of the doubt. After all, the network’s owner, Paramount, just agreed to give Trump $16 million to settle a baseless lawsuit over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which Trump claimed was biased against him. Practically no one believed Trump had a case. The payment was an effort by Paramount to smooth the path ahead for the multi-billion-dollar merger with Skydance Media, which requires federal approval.
It's worth remembering that during his first term, when he was furious at CNN (“you are Fake News!,” he repeatedly thundered at CNN’s Jim Acosta) he tried to block the merger of AT&T and then-CNN parent Time Warner. (Disclosure: I’m a paid CNN contributor.)
Colbert’s employer CBS and its owner Paramount surely remembered CNN’s owners’ experience.
This week, just before the late Thursday announcement that the end was near for the comedy show, Colbert had lambasted his bosses’ decision to settle the 60 Minutes lawsuit, calling it a “big fat bribe.” Paramount had said the suit was “completely without merit.” Colbert imagined a statement from them: “You may take our money, but you will never take our dignity. You may, however, purchase our dignity for the low, low price of $16 million. We need the cash.”
Colbert ridiculed Trump’s response to the furor over the Epstein case. The case is causing so much trouble for the president, Colbert joked, that “he recently ordered it to be put in a cell and for the cameras to stop working for three minutes.”
CBS is keeping a straight face as it claims the decision had nothing to do with Trump. But we simply can’t take CBS at its word, because it has done everything in its power, at the expense of its integrity, to ingratiate itself with Trump. The head of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, was pushed out, reportedly to please Trump, and the pressure on its news programs to go easy on Trump became so strong that the lead producer at 60 Minutes resigned.
Trump is not a dictator and the United States is still a democracy. But brick by brick, the safeguards against autocracy are being removed, sometimes by the president himself, sometimes by those afraid to suffer the cost of his wrath.
In the history of the American people’s struggle to hold back autocracy, the shutdown of Stephen Colbert’s show will figure as a marker, a sign that the challenge is real.