The network that forced Stephen Colbert from his show just let the door hit him on the way out.
Colbert’s emotional farewell during the finale of The Late Show last week was covered by virtually every national news outlet and network—except his own. And according to Status, the Colbert blackout was intentional.
Producers froze out Colbert after he took aim at newly installed CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil.
Colbert “kicked colleagues when they’re down,” a source at CBS told Status. “It was unprofessional and unprovoked.”
Earlier this month, Colbert joined the pile-on mocking Dokoupil after the anchor failed to secure the visa needed to travel to China and report on the summit between Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping—a high-profile blunder from CBS News.
While other reporters, including some from CBS, covered the summit from Beijing, Dokoupil was instead forced to report from Taipei, more than 1,000 miles away.
“All the news teams are on the ground in China to cover this epic and historic summit,” Colbert joked in a monologue on May 14. “All except one.”
After detailing the visa incident, Colbert turned his ire on the network as a whole: “Well, that is disappointing, but it does fit in with their slogan. ‘CBS News: when events happen, we’re at most one country away.”
Apparently, CBS News President Tom Cibrowski was not laughing. Status reported that he issued the Colbert blackout following the dunk on Dokoupil. Representatives for the network did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Snub aside, Colbert did not need any help drawing viewers for the final episode of The Late Show. The end of his nearly 11-year run was also his most-watched weeknight episode ever, according to preliminary Nielsen data obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.
The data shows that an estimated 6.74 million people tuned in to watch Colbert, 62, roast the 79-year-old president one last time in the final episode of his late-night talk show, which also featured appearances by Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, and Tim Meadows, plus a performance by Paul McCartney to close the show.
Though CBS says The Late Show’s cancellation after 11 seasons—and 23 prior with David Letterman—was a “purely financial decision,” the announcement came just days after Colbert denounced CBS’s $16 million settlement with Trump as a “big, fat bribe.”
Even Trump seemed to have tuned in. Just an hour after the finale aired, the fuming president embarked on yet another late-night Truth Social tirade around 2 a.m.
“Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person,” the president posted. “You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!”
The next morning, the host was still living rent-free in Trump’s head.
“Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS was the “Beginning of the End for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts,” he wrote.
