CBS Cancels Itself, Not Just Colbert

 

CBS Cancels Itself, Not Just Colbert

May 16, 2026

By Bill Carter

Mr. Carter is the author of “The Late Shift” and “The War for Late Night” and is editor at large for LateNighter.com

From the start of his career as a late-night television star on CBS, Stephen Colbert shattered the long-established broadcast network mold for who and what make a late-night host.

His previous experience, “The Colbert Report” (pronounced as though on TV Française) on Comedy Central, was a never-ending sketch, which had Mr. Colbert playing a caricature of a self-obsessed, blowhard conservative commentator.

He even conducted interviews on the show as the character, compelling him to tell his guests to be prepared for “a jerk.”

Before CBS, Mr. Colbert had almost never appeared as himself on television, nor most anywhere else. For years he gave interviews about the show completely in character, a guy who could not have been more opposite to the real Mr. Colbert in personality or political views.

Everyone had to be in on the fake news joke. It was a masterly, one-of-a-kind performance, one of the sharpest, most astute political satires ever produced for a mainstream audience — and a hit. It lasted for nine years. His recruitment by CBS to succeed the legendary David Letterman as host of “The Late Show” in 2014 made complete sense to me; he was a major comic star and he wanted the job. At the time, I was convinced it was a perfect match, and one sure to be easier than what Mr. Colbert had just pulled off. All he had to do this time was be the real Stephen Colbert.

What I didn’t anticipate was that the foundation of Mr. Colbert’s success was something new to late night: hard-core, point-of-view political comedy. He had developed it while contributing to “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. A broadcast network, steeped in the traditional “both sides” style of Johnny Carson, was going to expect him to drop that as well as the character.

CBS did; Mr. Colbert tried. It didn’t work.

His outspoken, pointedly satirical voice was muted in his early “Late Show” performances. He looked a bit lost, as though in trying to be the real Stephen Colbert whom CBS anticipated, he was actually becoming another character — and not a terribly funny one.

At risk of losing the gig, Mr. Colbert agreed to CBS’s push for a new executive producer, Chris Licht, with only TV news credits: “Morning Joe” and “CBS This Morning.”

Mr. Colbert later praised Mr. Licht and conceded he had been crucial in transforming the show into “what we really want to do,” which was build the comedy around the news of the day (even if Mr. Colbert had given up pretending to be a fake news anchor).

Mr. Licht’s arrival in 2016 coincided with the political rise of Donald Trump — and a grudge match made in media heaven was born.

Mr. Colbert started finishing first in late-night about a year later and stayed in the position for most of the time since.

Mr. Colbert is leaving the Ed Sullivan Theater this Thursday, after around 1,800 shows. CBS has said, definitely and defensively, that this is purely a business decision. Nobody really believes that, but even the No. 1 late-night show is not the moneymaker it once was. It’s expensive to produce. The broadcast ratings are not what they used to be. Those viewers who are left are disproportionately older, and of less interest to advertisers.

The network says it decided to end “The Late Show” because it was losing at least $40 million a year. Sounds credible, doesn’t it? Maybe not. Many insiders — including Mr. Colbert’s friend and direct competitor, Jimmy Kimmel — have noted that CBS’s calculation left out some key factors. It did not include the effect of Mr. Colbert’s star presence on the fees CBS is able to command from local affiliate stations. It shrugged off the value the network has gained from sending stars of its series onto the show for promotion. It ignored Mr. Colbert’s role in bringing viewers to those affiliates’ 11 p.m. news shows, in anticipation of the new “Late Show” episode that would air right after.

Mr. Colbert says the network never raised its financial concerns, and did not push for any of the ways such a show could cut costs. (When NBC saw declining revenues from its own late-night offerings, it eliminated the band on Seth Meyers’s show and cut Jimmy Fallon’s back to four days a week.) In fact, Mr. Colbert said CBS was “feverish” to lock him into a new contract only three years ago.

Mr. Colbert, as gentlemanly a star as there is on television, has thrown no on-air tantrums. He’s mostly left the open disparagement of the bosses to his predecessor, David Letterman.

But it’s no secret what transpired in between that eager pitch to extend his run and that sudden closing notice: CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was on the verge of a merger. President Trump, who had been wounded by Mr. Colbert’s political satire, and who on many occasions had publicly called for him to be canceled (or “put to sleep” in one memorable social media message), had returned to office and was in a position to interfere with any deal.

Paramount had already taken steps widely seen as currying favor with the administration, most notably when it signed off on a $16 million payment to settle a lawsuit Mr. Trump brought against CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” even though legal experts said Mr. Trump had very little chance of prevailing in court.

In a monologue, Mr. Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe.” He got word he’d been canceled just days later. A week or so after that, the deal was approved.

However CBS attempts to characterize the Colbert decision from now on, that’s what people will remember.

Having a late-night star on the air most weeknights has been a powerful statement, affirming that the broadcasters were still in the game, still offering original programming taped before a live audience that viewers showed up for, year round. Successful hosts became their networks’ signature stars.

In forcing Mr. Colbert out and shutting down a 33-year late-night franchise — while selling that post-local-news hour of airtime to a syndicated show instead of replacing him with an original program of the network’s own creation — CBS is assenting to its own diminishment.

The biggest loss is to core American values, such as the right to speak freely, even in brutally mocking terms, about those in power. Then there is the opportunity, shared by everyone, to find and be entertained by voices like that on a free national platform, or to turn them off and watch something else.

 

A Republican You’ve Never Heard of Points the Way

 

A Republican You’ve Never Heard of Points the Way

May 17, 2026

 

By David French

Opinion Columnist

Last Tuesday, the Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey, stood before his colleagues and gave a speech that exemplified two virtues that can seem almost extinct in the Trump Republican Party: wisdom and courage.

Days before, he had received a call from President Trump asking for his support for a midterm gerrymander in South Carolina. Trump wants South Carolina to follow the lead of Texas, Tennessee and other Republican-led states to try to wipe out as many Democratic districts as possible.

But Senator Massey said no. He would not agree to gerrymander Democrats out of existence in South Carolina. Specifically, he vowed — and voted — to protect James Clyburn’s district. Clyburn is the only Black member of the House from South Carolina.

And when Massey said no, he didn’t just defy a president; he defied many of his Republican colleagues and he undoubtedly defied many of his own constituents. He made his speech one week after Indiana primary voters defeated at least five Republican state senators who’d refused to gerrymander their state further.

South Carolina is already heavily gerrymandered. Democrats usually get roughly 40 percent of the statewide vote in presidential elections, but the state has six Republican districts and one Democratic district.

Massey’s speech is notable not just for its defiance, but for its depth. Using the plain, populist language of a Southern politician (there are lots of y’alls in there), he made both a principled and a pragmatic case for American pluralism.

Before we get rolling on the speech itself, I should mention that Massey is no Republican squish. In the speech, he calls himself a “rabid partisan.” He agreed that Washington Democrats are “crazy.” He said some Democratic ideas are “wacky.” He included a flattering reference to one of South Carolina’s favorite sons, John C. Calhoun.

For those who aren’t familiar with Calhoun, he was one of America’s most reprehensible politicians. He almost split the Union before the Civil War, and he referred to slavery as a “positive good.” Massey also said: “I’ve got too much Southern in my blood. I’ve got too much resistance in my heritage” to capitulate to pressure. This is not a man who’s about to switch parties.

At the same time, however, Massey recognizes that there are issues that transcend partisan politics and that legislators don’t just exist to exercise power. They should also, well, safeguard the Republic, including by upholding the letter and spirit of the Constitution. If any American faction tries to crush its opponents through the use of raw power rather than debating and defeating its opponents in the marketplace of ideas, then it places the American system under intolerable strain.

It’s worth watching the entire speech, but you can also boil it down to a few simple points.

First, our system was designed to divide power not only between the different branches of the federal government, but also between the federal government and the sovereign states. Trump should not dominate the federal government, and he should not dominate the state of South Carolina.

“The separation of powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been created in the history of man,” Massey said. “It is that important. And what the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is terrible. And we all see the results of that.”

As for South Carolina, there is “another brilliant creation, and that is of federalism and the sovereignty of the states. I don’t want to be a participant in further eroding federalism and further diminishing the essential role of states.”

Second, Republicans in South Carolina should not try to destroy the Democratic Party in their home state. In fact, Massey made an argument that we rarely hear any politician make. “I will tell my Republican friends: Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable,” Massey said. “We are. Competition makes you better, y’all.”

People often say that America needs two healthy parties. This is a matter of common sense. In a two-party system, power will change hands regularly, and if power is lurching between the competent and the incompetent, between the honest and the corrupt, then the system will not just tip out of balance sometimes, but will be inherently unstable.

We don’t often think, however, that healthy political parties can make each other better. Yet this also makes sense. To defeat a viable opponent, a party has to rise to the challenge. It has to fix its failures. It has to innovate. Defeating a sclerotic rump of a party is no achievement. Instead, one-party rule enables corruption. It fosters stagnation.

This is human nature. If you take a test that you know you’re going to pass, how hard do you study? If you run a race that you’re guaranteed to win, how hard do you push yourself?

Third, Massey dealt directly with one of the most pernicious arguments in politics: You should try to crush your opponents because if the roles were reversed, then they would surely try to crush you. You should, in other words, engage in pre-emptive retaliation for an imagined offense.

What was Massey’s response to the claim that the Democrats in South Carolina would do the same thing to Republicans if they had the chance? “I would hope that wouldn’t be the case, but I’m not naïve. My larger question, though: Is that the way it should happen? ‘They do it to you, so you should do it to them?’ Do unto others as you believe they would do unto you? Is that it?”

“I don’t remember that being the context in the Gospel of Matthew,” he said, “and I don’t think the Messiah meant it only as something to apply to children, but how we interact with each other.”

Fourth, he made a point that every American leader should remember. This nation — the most powerful in the world — cannot be conquered by an outside foe, but it can destroy itself. And it will destroy itself if it abandons its founding principles and its founding values. “Maybe we become convinced that the only way to preserve the Republic is to implement policies that are contrary to the founding ideas of the Republic,” he worried. “Maybe we turn on ourselves. Maybe 250 years in,” we will no longer be able to keep our Republic.

I know that I disagree with Senator Massey on many things, not least on his regard for Calhoun, much less on being a rabid partisan, but if we’re going to get through this terrible national moment, we cannot rely only on our own political allies or a single political party. Our Republic will have to be rescued by people who voted for Trump three times, alongside people who resisted him from Day 1.

I also know that Massey is engaged in an almost certainly doomed struggle. His vote — along with those of four of his Republican colleagues — denied Republicans the two-thirds majority they needed to continue the legislative session and move forward with redistricting.

On Thursday, however, the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, called a special session, and a new congressional map can pass with a simple majority vote.

When I speak in public, I’m often asked what gives me hope. My answer comes from unexpected people in unexpected places who demonstrate uncommon virtue.

At the grand scale, I think of the Ukrainian comedian who has defied the Russian bear. I think of the vice president who found his voice when an angry mob came for his head. I think of a Canadian prime minister who stood up to a president and articulated a compelling vision for preserving the free world.

But the smaller battles matter as well. And now I think of a Republican state senator who knew he would probably lose (and might lose his seat as well), but made his stand nonetheless.

And he made a statement that I’ve longed to hear in the age of Trump: “If we’re going to lose this radical idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that in its Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government to ensure the debate of ideas — if that’s going to happen, Mr. President, by God, it’s not going to be because I surrendered it.”

“I’m voting no.”

 

 

The next massive consumer ai opportunity is making personal agents feel as intuitive as an iPhone. This is deeply important because this is the new software layer for everyday life. Most ppl do not want to configure workflows, manage prompts, route models, or think about agents at all. They want software that just works & the winning products will hide almost all of the complexity with taste incl. context, memory, & orchestration. There’ll be baseline personal agents that come alive out of the box which are already understanding your context, patterns, relationships, preferences, apps, devices, routines, etc.

Then there’ll be ephemeral agents that spawn dynamically from intent, ambient capture, conversation, location, screenshots, email, calendar, camera roll, whatever.

This is the software that assembles itself around the moment just like weather updates based on your location but way more in depth. Today even the most state-of-the-art agent products feel like giving normal people shell access to a distributed system. Apple won by turning computers from something you operated into something you experienced. Personal agents require the same transition. Whoever solves this becomes the ambient operating system for human life.

The Identity Crisis Your Security Team Didn't See Coming

 

The Identity Crisis Your Security Team Didn't See Coming

ByDarren Guccione,

Forbes Councils Member.

May 20, 2026, 07:00am EDT

Darren Guccione, CEO and cofounder, Keeper Security.

​For decades, identity security meant one thing: protecting the humans who access your systems. You issued credentials, enforced passwords, deployed multifactor authentication and moved on.

That model made sense when the identities you were managing were tied to a real person.​

That world no longer exists.​ AI has redefined what an identity is, and most enterprises are nowhere near catching up.

AI agents don’t wait for instructions from a human to act. Rather, they operate autonomously and around the clock to execute transactions, access sensitive systems or interact with external applications.

Every agent requires credentials and access rights to function. Where a large organization might manage tens of thousands of human identities, the number of non-human identities (NHIs) can scale far beyond and outnumber the human workforce across an enterprise ecosystem.​

At RSAC 2026, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said it frankly: When identities operate at machine speed, traditional security models break. AI agents require a new model for establishing trust, not just a retooled version of the old model.​

The Scale Problem Is The Easy Part​

The harder problem is behavioral. NHIs act nothing like human identities, and organizations that govern them the same way are creating exposure they may not recognize until it's too late.

Human accounts have a person behind them, someone who can be questioned, suspended or fired. NHIs, on the other hand, are frequently created on demand by developers or automated processes, with no centralized oversight and no clear owner.

They also don't map onto legacy privileged access management models designed around human behavior. For example, an employee logging in to an unusual system at 3:00 a.m. triggers alerts, while an AI agent doing the same thing looks routine—until it becomes a breach.​

The risk is not hypothetical. When AI agent social network Moltbook launched, a misconfigured database exposed roughly 1.5 million API authentication tokens within days. Researchers from Wiz found that anyone with those tokens could impersonate or take control of agents that had access to internal systems like Slack and email.

In many enterprise environments, machines and NHIs already outnumber human users 92-to-1, according to my company's survey of 109 cybersecurity professionals conducted on-site at RSA Conference 2026. That's 92 entry points for every one that requires compromising a human.​

The broader industry is struggling to keep pace. The same survey found that only 28% of organizations have full visibility into NHIs across cloud, on-premises and SaaS environments. More than 40% had already experienced a security incident involving non-human identities or credentials in the past year. Another 32% weren't sure whether one had occurred—a detection gap that is itself a problem.​

These are solvable problems, but most aren’t solving them fast enough. Security governance for NHIs needs to move faster, because AI deployment certainly isn't slowing down.​

Where To Start​

Most security teams know they have an NHI problem. Fewer know where to begin solving it.

The answer starts with visibility: Get a full accounting of your NHIs. Most organizations have a surprisingly poor picture of how many exist, who created them and what they can access. Without this visibility, everything else is just guesswork.​

Once you have visibility, the next step is to apply least-privilege access to NHIs with more discipline than you would normally apply to humans. AI agents accumulate permissions over time, often far beyond what any single task requires. Reducing that footprint and automating enforcement will limit the damage when something goes wrong.​

Move away from standing permissions toward a least-privilege model with just-in-time access. Agents shouldn't hold 24/7 access to systems they use occasionally any more than employees should. Dynamic, task-specific access is harder to exploit and easier to audit.​

Finally, track down dormant identities. Abandoned service accounts and unused API keys don't disappear but sit quietly with whatever access they were originally granted. These "zombie" identities represent risk with zero operational value. Decommissioning them needs to be a standard practice, not a once-a-year cleanup project.​

Conclusion ​

NHI security is not an IT hygiene issue. It sits at the intersection of data security, regulatory compliance and operational risk. Every AI agent your organization deploys is an identity with access to real systems.

The identity perimeter has already expanded beyond what most organizations are prepared to govern. The question is no longer whether to build a framework for NHIs. It's whether your organization will do it before or after a breach forces the issue.​

 

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Trump is Creating a Permanent Kleptocracy The IRS slush fund scandal is the latest step toward institutionalizing corruption for all future presidents. Where is MAGA's outrage? Ron Fournier May 20 IT WAS BAD enough when President Trump gave himself a taxpayer-fueled $1.7 billion slush fund to settle his frivolous lawsuit with the IRS. But now we learn that the sweetheart deal he cut with an agency he controls comes with a stay-out-of-jail card. As part of the resolution to his suit over the leak of his tax returns, the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the Trump organization’s current tax examinations, according to a one-page document posted to the Justice Department’s website. Trump has literally put himself above the law, exaggerating the damage done to him and pressuring the IRS to give him a free pass on all past —and possibly future — wrongdoing. It’s a blank check for corruption. It moves the United States closer to a permanent kleptocracy — a form of government in which the empowered systematically use their offices to enrich themselves — unless you’re naive enough to think that precedents like this won’t be copied by future Democratic and Republican administrations. The document is signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s private attorney. Outrageous. It is a separate addendum to the original settlement announced Monday, and was quietly added to the Justice Department website on Tuesday. Oh, and remember: Trumped repeatedly promised voters he would release his tax records. So the leaker (an IRS contractor) simply kept Trump’s promise. Why do I call Trump’s IRS lawsuit frivolous? After the presiding judge questioned whether Trump could legally sue an agency he controls, IRS lawyers prepared to fight the suit, according to this New York Times story: I.R.S. officials prepared a 25-page memorandum outlining what they saw as flaws in Mr. Trump’s suit and advising the Justice Department to move to dismiss it, according to two people familiar with the memo. That memo was provided to Treasury officials in April, and it is unclear if they passed it along to its intended recipients at the Justice Department, according to the people, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal government deliberations. No lawyers from the Justice Department ever appeared in court to respond to the suit or disputed any of Mr. Trump’s claims, which demanded at least $10 billion from the I.R.S. for not doing enough to prevent the leak of his tax information. Forbidding the IRS from fighting, Trump reached into taxpayers’ pockets for $1.7 billion that he can spend virtually anyway he wants: The slush fund will be overseen by a board he controls. The settlement designates the money to people Trump claims were unfairly treated by Biden’s Department of Justice. Some suspect money will go to the Jan. 6 rioters who attempted to overthrow the democratically elected Biden administration in 2021. Or to people ensnared in Trump’s multiple criminal investigations. My gut: Most of the money goes directly to Trump and his family because that’s the pattern he set during multiple feather-nesting schemes — from his personalized smart phones to the ethically dubious stock trades and cryptocurrency investments. In January, the Times editorial board calculated the size of Trump’s gift: $1.4 billion. President Trump has never been a man to ask what he can do for his country. In his second term, as in his first, he is instead testing the limits of what his country can do for him. He has poured his energy and creativity into the exploitation of the presidency — into finding out just how much money people, corporations and other nations are willing to put into his pockets in hopes of bending the power of the government to the service of their interests. A review by the editorial board relying on analyses from news organizations shows that Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion. We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow. He is the most corrupt president in our nation’s 250-year history. I’m not naive: Corruption in politics is as old as politics, and both major U.S. parties are steeped in it. But rather than oppose kleptocracy, as they claim to do, MAGA voters defend it, rationalize it, and even applaud it. Where is their outrage?