President Trump winning his second, non-consecutive term and the assassination of Charlie Kirk have brought on drastic changes in American politics, culture, and history. Late-night television is certainly not at the top of the list of things affected in terms of significance; nonetheless, it too has been drastically impacted.
In July, CBS announced that it would not be renewing Stephen Colbert’s contract, and it would be ending The Late Show next May. Jimmy Kimmel got his show, running since 2003, cancelled after suggesting in his 17 September monologue that the assassin of Charlie Kirk was a Trump supporter. I have yet to get to the point about media corruption in this piece, but as a prelude to that, we should note that some media outlets even had trouble reporting on that fact about the show’s cancellation.
However, first off, let’s start on a personal note. I am one of the young, white males who have been pushed to the right—in the American context, to the Republican Party—in the ‘Gamergate’ era of the mid-2010s. Protecting free speech, in response to leftist pressure on companies to fire people with differing opinions, then on social media companies to censor content at their whim, was one of the most prominent principles of the right-wing—or, to be more accurate, anti-progressive—movement at the time.
That is why, when I saw the same tactics employed against people who celebrated or mocked Charlie Kirk’s death, I was conflicted. I was more outraged at the high number of positive engagements that some of those social media posts got than the posts themselves—I have come across multiple with hundreds of thousands of likes. However, I was also displeased with seeing people on the right celebrating getting people fired for offensive social media posts—and, for the record, I hope that this practice stops.
With the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, however, I never had any such conflicting feelings.
I covered the topic of late-night comedy in the United States back in February 2024, when the return of President Trump to the White House was just a hopeful prediction, not a reality. To reiterate some of the points in that piece, let’s make one important distinction: Jimmy Kimmel was not a simple, edgy stand-up coming to do his set at the Laugh Factory or Carolines on Broadway. Kimmel had 19 staff writers at the time of his cancellation, and his show was backed by one of the biggest corporations in the world, Disney. Add to that Colbert’s show running on the Paramount-owned CBS, and Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers’s shows running on the NBCUniversal-owned NBC with similar writing staffs.
Yet lo and behold, all the around 80 comics writing for these four shows have had serious trouble coming up with jokes about left-wing politicians and figures, no matter the news cycle, and have been just stuck with dedicating each of their monologues to attacking President Trump and his surrogates. That was the case even when poor old President Joe Biden was struggling to put two English sentences together and his approval ratings were in the 30s.
Kimmel even used to have a recurring joke on his show where he edited nude versions of videos of President Trump. In some countries, that would be considered a serious sex crime…
You would have to be beyond naive to think that all late-night comedy shows on network television tilting heavily to the left is just a coincidence. You would be even more naive to believe that this is a result of the free market: since coming out heavily against President Trump, Kimmel has lost a significant portion of the audience. While in 2015, he averaged 2.4 million live viewers, in 2025, thus far, he has averaged around 1.7 million. In the meantime, Greg Gutfeld’s right-wing late-night show on the cable channel Fox News eclipsed all his network competition. Since the fall of 2022, Gutfeld has been the highest-rated late-night comedy show in the US, currently averaging 3.3 million viewers per show. And he became number one without constant access to A-list celebrity guests like Fallon, Colbert, or Kimmel.
Yet, even in that environment, network executives across three corporations thought it was a better tactic to let three shows compete for the same superliberal audience than to hire a new host that would appeal more to the right-wing side of the country.
What they also thought of doing in unison was donating to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 election cycle, CBS employees gave $46,500 to the DNC Services Corp, and NBCUniversal employees gave $68,494 to the DNC and an additional $34,941 to the progressive action group ActBlue. Meanwhile, Disney, the parent company of ABC, was among the top donors to Kamala Harris’s campaign among all companies, giving her losing presidential run a whopping $968,518.
It would be hard to argue that this looks like honest comedy or ‘speaking truth to power’. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has described the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! as ‘North Korea-type crap’. I was quite happy to see that, given I used the same kind of terminology for Kimmel, Fallon, and Colbert’s comedy in my February 2024 piece. Segments like when the writers for Jimmy Fallon give ‘thank you notes’ to Hillary Clinton on The Tonight Show, or when Stephen Colbert’s comedy bit was about how great the economy was under President Biden, despite the public perception—I described these bits as ‘North Korean style of comedy’.
And, to get to my last point, all this was taking place on public air. Terrestrial television is broadcast through government-funded infrastructure in the United States, unlike cable television. Thus, the federal government, through the FCC, is well within its rights to give guidelines on the type of content it wants to broadcast. As someone with libertarian leanings and a true appreciation of free speech, am I wary of government overreach in the regulation of network television? Yes, of course I am. But do I believe that penalizing companies that use public airwaves to broadcast high-production shows which exclusively mock the opposition to the party they donate to constitutes such overreach? Absolutely not.
In fact, I am glad to see it.
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