A shocking change in late-night TV. A salacious story about Jeffrey Epstein.
What do they have in common? Donald Trump.
Specifically, Trump’s use of the Presidency to bend media companies to his will. It’s a power he’s used so effectively in his second term that any threat he makes has to be taken seriously. And that any decision a big media company makes will be seen through a Trump-colored lens, regardless of the facts — which ends up increasing that power.
In the case of Paramount’s call to end Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, there’s no evidence that the company’s current owner, Shari Redstone, made the move to appease Trump by kiboshing a TV host who routinely rips into the president. The same goes for Larry Ellison and David Ellison, who plan to buy Paramount via their Skydance studio.
Paramount itself took pains to say the decision was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” And as we constantly note here, late-night TV — and all TV — is very much challenged: Ratings for just about any conventional TV programming that isn’t the NFL are shrinking. And the viewers who watch late-night shows like Colbert’s have been dwindling, and aging, for years.
Subtract Trump from the story, and this would be just another signpost telling us that the internet has supplanted TV. And that the TV industry doesn’t know how to deal with it other than a never-ending series of cuts and garage sales.
“Over the next few years, we expect virtually all linear TV programming outside of sports and news to shift to catalog content and reruns of what appeared on streaming; there simply will not be a business model to support original entertainment programming on linear TV,” Lightshed analyst Rich Greenfield wrote in a research note Friday morning.
The thing is, Trump is all over the story.
That’s because Redstone has already paid a $16 million ransom to Trump, in order to settle a seemingly spurious lawsuit he filed about a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall.
And the Ellisons, who plan to buy Paramount if the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission signs off on the deal this fall, are already deeply enmeshed with Trump.
Larry Ellison, who Forbes says is now the second-richest man in the world, is a longtime Trump donor whose Oracle software company is doing lots of Trump-blessed business these days. His son David, who will run Paramount, has been actively seeking Trump’s blessing — which is presumably why he was spotted hanging out with Trump ringside at two UFC matches this spring.
So is there a world where Redstone agreed to move out Colbert as a way to placate Trump — or to do so on behalf of the Ellisons, for the same reasons?
So far, there’s zero reporting out there making that case. But plenty of people immediately wondered out loud if it was so, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, who both put out statements Thursday night wondering if Colbert’s show was killed for “political reasons.”
(Paramount declined to comment beyond its initial press release. A rep for Skydance, the Ellison-owned company that will control Paramount if the sale goes through, also declined to comment. Trump, meanwhile, applauded Colbert’s cancellation: “I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” he posted.)
But if you’re looking for more evidence that Trump expects America’s media companies to do what he wants, you didn’t have to look very hard on Thursday.
After The Wall Street Journal published a story about a racy poem and drawing Trump allegedly gave to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, Trump announced that he had told both Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor, and Rupert Murdoch, who owns the paper via his News Corp., not to publish the report.
Because they did, Trump said Thursday night via his Truth Social platform, he would sue Murdoch and his publications. “I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his “pile of garbage” newspaper, the WSJ.,” Trump added in a follow-up post Friday morning.
Will Trump actually do that?
On the one hand, Trump is well-known for threatening media companies with lawsuits, and throughout his career has sometimes followed up. He’s never actually filed a suit while he was president, however. And up until last year, he didn’t have much luck with the suits he did file.
That changed last fall, after Trump’s reelection. Since then, we’ve seen a series of media and tech companies settle Trump’s suits with multimillion-dollar payouts — settlements most legal experts say those companies would never have offered if he didn’t have the power of the presidency behind him.
Which in my mind gives his current threat much more currency — even though it would end up pitting Trump against the man who also owns and controls Fox News, an outlet Trump watches constantly, and uses to staff his administration.
There’s no point in speculating what would happen if Trump does follow through with his suit (the White House press office, asked for comment, referred me to Trump’s Truth Social posts). But we don’t have to speculate about Trump’s presence in media boardrooms and everywhere else — he’s in everyone’s heads, whether they like it or not.
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