Jon Stewart has become the latest late-night host to weigh in on the possibility that Paramount Global, which owns The Daily Show, will settle President Donald Trump’s $20B lawsuit against CBS News over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
“What you’re seeing now is all must pay tribute to the king and the price of peace is different,” Stewart said.
Stewart discussed the issue on The Bill Simmons Podcast. “I’m in a spot where I can do [The Daily Show on] Monday until the company is bought out by people that don’t want anything to do with The Daily Show, and then who the f*ck knows what’s gonna happen. I mean, look at what they’re doing now at 60 Minutes and CBS News and everything else,” he added.
It comes after Stewart’s former colleague Stephen Colbert brought up the issue on CBS’ The Late Show, highlighting “scurrilous accusations that Paramount is engaged in corporate malfeasance”. He also compared it to Disney-owned ABC settling its own lawsuit with the President. “This is what happens when you capitulate to an autocrat,” he said. “Thanks to this terrible precedent, Trump thinks he can extort the media wherever and whenever they do something he doesn’t like”.
Paramount Global is seeking approval from the FCC for its merger with Skydance and there have been reports that CBS could settle for as much as $50M.
Stewart said the situation was “insane”. “ABC had to pay $15M, Bezos had to pay $40M for a documentary on Melania. Zuckerberg had to pay. They just put money into the pot… what does that remind you of? It’s protection money. Ultimately, at the end of this, does Trump burn our f*cking country down for insurance money? Where are we headed?
“Imagine paying $50M for fucking nothing, just to get somebody to approve a merger,” he added, calling it “bribery”. “Now, he’ll go after Harvard and Comcast or whatever the hell else he does because a policy of appeasement always leads to more conquest,” he said.
On the podcast, Stewart, who returned to The Daily Show last year one night a week, also talked about the state of late-night television and praised hosts such as Seth Meyers and John Mulaney.
He said that YouTube has made a difference. “The ratings traditionally are maybe not the same, but I would argue the reach of it is maybe bigger. It may not be monetized through advertising dollars in the way that they think makes it an efficient use of network capital, but in terms of its ability to permeate and people to see it, I think is still really, really large,” he said.
He called Mulaney’s Everybody’s Live a “cool thing” because it allows him to be as “creative as like old time Letterman on a weekly basis on Netflix”.
So, Stewart doesn’t believe that late-night is going away that “creativity finds a way”. “People find a way to make topical commentary or interviewing interesting. That’s always going to be something that I think will have appeal. It just may not have an appeal with 250 employees in a giant theater,” he added.
The post “All Must Pay Tribute To The King”: Jon Stewart Weighs Into Paramount-Skydance Merger & ‘60 Minutes’ Furor appeared first on Deadline.
