Rachel Maddow recently said on Nicolle Wallace’s “The Best People” podcast that CBS and its parent company Paramount should reconsider canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” calling the network’s post-Paramount–Skydance-merger culture a “huge embarrassment.”
“Maybe you can now see where in history you’re going to end up, and now’s your chance to try to alter that and try to get right,” Maddow said. “And I think that a lot of institutions are in that same boat.”
The political commentator and TV host also pointed to what she described as corporate “capitulation” to President Donald Trump over the past year, including by the executives who chose to cancel “The Late Show” in July. At the time of the announcement, CBS cited the cancellation as “purely a financial decision.”
“It was absolutely transparent what CBS and Paramount were doing with getting rid of Stephen Colbert. ‘Oh, it’s a financial decision.’ Right, because having the highest-rated late-night show in America for years is somehow financially unsustainable now when it wasn’t before?” Maddow said.
“At the same time that you’ve got Trump-connected oligarchs taking over this company and putting a right-wing blogger in charge of CBS News,” she added, referring to executives like Bari Weiss, the newly appointed CBS News editor-in-chief.
Maddow went on to call for Paramount to reconsider its cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which is scheduled to broadcast its final episode in May 2026.
“They announced the cancellation of Colbert — everybody knows what it’s about,” Maddow said. “They’re trying to sort of live down their shame already, and I think in terms of the way they are capitulating, the CBS News takeover has been a huge embarrassment to everybody involved in it. And, you know, they should reverse the decision about Colbert. He’s still on the air now, he’s still got a few months on the horizon left before they plan on taking him off the air. They should change that.”
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Watch Maddow’s full interview on “The Best People” podcast below.
From Variety US