The Lights Aren’t Going Out Because We Stopped Watching

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Self-Censorship

Just three days before CBS canceled The Late Show, Stephen Colbert publicly criticized CBS's parent company, Paramount, for its $16 million settlement with Donald Trump—a deal Senator Elizabeth Warren described as looking like bribery. The timing is difficult to ignore. If Colbert's cancellation was even partly a response to that critique, then this isn't merely a business decision—it’s a warning shot. A purge dressed as programming.

We are living in dangerous times, my friends—when self-censorship to please an audience of one begins shaping programming decisions. What gets cut from the airwaves isn’t always about profit or ratings anymore. It’s about not upsetting the wrong person. Or worse: anticipating what that person might dislike, and folding before the fight even begins.

My first exposure to Stephen Colbert, ironically, was to the right-wing demagogue he played on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He was so pitch-perfect in his parody of a smug, self-righteous neocon that I occasionally missed the joke. That was Colbert’s gift: he could inhabit the absurd so completely that you laughed—and squirmed—before realizing you were the punchline.

When he stepped out from behind that character to host The Late Show, many wondered if he’d lose his edge. Instead, he sharpened it. What we got wasn’t just satire—it was conviction, cloaked in comedy. And now, that voice is being silenced.

Paramount’s decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, despite its commanding ratings and cultural relevance, cannot be taken at face value. When a network pulls the plug on its top late-night program and insists it’s “not about performance,” that’s not just a euphemism—it’s a confession. A confession that the decision was made not in service to the audience, nor to the legacy of the medium, but to the balance sheets and boardroom ambitions of a company preparing for a merger.

This is the quiet authoritarianism of capital: no knock at the door, no FCC memo, just a spreadsheet-driven muzzle applied to a voice that too often told the truth. Colbert didn’t fail. He succeeded. That’s the problem. Unlike many of his peers, he didn’t hide behind irony. He stared down disinformation, state corruption, the January 6 insurrection, the erosion of civil norms—and he did it night after night, in a medium that still reached the living rooms of Middle America.

And that’s the danger. His wit, like any satire worth its name, was unpredictable. That’s not a product you want on the shelf when you're trying to sell the whole store.

So the suits call it “financial.” As if a show at the top of its game has suddenly become too expensive. As if the cost of truth-telling is incompatible with shareholder value. In reality, what they’re saying is: we can’t afford this kind of independence anymore.

And this silencing makes you wonder: what happens to Jimmy Kimmel? He’s been relentlessly acerbic toward Trump—not just in monologues, but even during Disney’s crown-jewel event, the Oscars, where he live-tweeted criticism of Trump while hosting. Kimmel’s jabs were direct, public, and personal. And yet Disney said nothing. The silence wasn’t reassuring. It was ominous. Because in an age of strategic silence, inaction isn’t neutrality—it’s documentation. A record. A warning.

The danger now isn't just censorship, but preemptive self-erasure. The risk is that any parody of this regime—or anything the regime dislikes—never even gets pitched. Not out of explicit repression, but out of corporate fecklessness and fear.

Make no mistake—this is the downstream effect of decades of media consolidation. Fewer companies owning more channels, platforms, voices. And when those companies become brittle and overleveraged, the first thing they sacrifice is not the underperforming property, but the uncontrollable one.

Colbert wasn’t just another host. He was a problem—for liars, for demagogues, and now, for the accountants at Paramount. And in a time of creeping authoritarianism, corporate cowardice may be just as dangerous. Because it disguises itself as pragmatism. Because it smiles while flipping the switch.

What we are witnessing is not just the end of a show. It’s the dimming of a cultural lighthouse.

And the lights aren’t going out because we stopped watching.
They’re going out because someone upstairs decided it’s safer to keep us in the dark.

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CODA

“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (from Cabaret) - Kander and Ebb

It begins with one voice.

A boy stands in a sunlit beer garden, blond hair slicked back, face clean and bright. He sings of meadows and freedom, his voice clear as glass.

“The sun on the meadow is summery warm / The stag in the forest runs free...”

At first, people listen politely. Then one by one, they rise. An old man. A woman holding her child. A man in uniform. They join in—not just in harmony, but in conviction, unified by a strange force. The camera pans down: the boy is wearing a brown shirt and a swastika arm band.

By the final verse, the entire crowd is standing, eyes lit with something far stronger than joy.

“Tomorrow belongs to me.”

The song ends. Michael York, entering a car, asks his friend, “and you still think you can control them?” The silence after hums.

And that’s how it can happen—not with boots at the door, but with a beautiful melody, sung in broad daylight, while everyone tells themselves it’s just a song.

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“Radio Ga Ga” - Queen

There was a time—not so long ago—when a voice could mean something. Just a voice. Carried on static, punching through distance and sleep and silence, breaking into bedrooms and garages and dorm rooms. You didn’t have to see the face. You didn’t have to know the name. All you had to do was listen. And listening meant something.

Radio didn’t care what you looked like. It didn’t care if you were white or Black or broke or drunk or brilliant or all of the above. It was a great, crackling democracy of sound, and inside it, people like me—like us—could exist. Not as caricatures. Not as quotas. But as voices. Not seen, but heard.

But now? Everything is ga ga. Glitzed up and glossed down and auto-tuned into oblivion. What we once called “broadcast” is now branding. What we once called truth is now content. And Queen saw it coming. Freddie wrapped that eulogy in a melody so sweet, and with the raw power of his voice, that voice, you didn’t even hear him grieving. But he was.

“You had your time, you had the power...”

This wasn’t just about radio. It was about loss. Cultural loss. Emotional loss. The quiet institutional murder of anything that doesn’t feed the machine. The death of real weirdos, of nighttime DJs, of dangerous voices, of late-night satirists who dared to tell the truth with a smile and a suit. It’s all vanishing—not with a bang, but with a whisper.

The powers that be aren’t burning books anymore. They’re burying signals. They’re teaching us not to expect realness. To crave the comforting hum of conformity. And the scariest part? It’s working.

That’s why I chose the Live Aid version of “Radio Ga Ga.” Not the studio recording. Not the official video. But the one from July 13, 1985—just a few days past its 40th anniversary. Because in that moment, with 72,000 people clapping overhead in perfect rhythm, and over a billion watching from around the world, the signal was alive. The wires were still hot. And Freddie Mercury wasn’t just performing—he was commanding an empire of memory. He made the world listen. He created one of the greatest moments in the history of television and pop culture. For a moment, he made the whole planet feel.

That wasn’t just a show. It was proof of life.
And forty years later, it’s still electric.

For those five minutes, we were visible. We were unified. The voice hadn’t vanished. The light hadn’t dimmed. Not yet.

“Someone still loves you.”

That line. That line is everything. It’s the last flicker. The hope that someone, somewhere, still remembers what a real voice sounds like. What it means to hear something unapproved, unfiltered, unforgiven.

So here’s the rallying cry, stitched from ghost frequencies and amplifier dust:

Tune back in. Turn it up. Be loud. Be human. Be inconvenient.
Because if we let the last of the real signals die, we don’t just lose music or satire or radio.

We lose us.