CNN’s Jake Tapper slammed Paramount for bowing to President Donald Trump with its cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“Obviously, President Trump has made no secret of his hatred of being mocked—specifically, the jokes that people like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel make at his expense,” Tapper said.
He then took CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to task.
“Paramount is in a bend-the-knee phase,” Tapper went on. “Paramount is attempting to please President Trump as Paramount’s Shari Redstone waits for the Trump administration’s blessing for a lucrative merger with a company called Skydance.”
David Ellison, CEO of Skydance, is indeed reported to have met with Trump’s Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, on Saturday to discuss terms for the multi-billion-dollar prospective media deal.
While CBS executives have said canning Colbert’s show “is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” broadcasting, critics have been quick to point out that also it comes hot on the heels of Paramount paying Trump $16 million to settle its lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris—a deal Colbert called a “big, fat bribe.”
Described by legal experts as “substantively very weak,” Trump claimed the network deceptively edited the interview to “tip the scales in favour of the Democratic Party” ahead of last year’s election.
“Paramount was determined to settle with the president, and it’s that timing that CBS was no doubt attempting to head off in their announcement of the termination of the Colbert show—which was doing very well in ratings, by the way,” Tapper added.
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