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Longtime reporter Bill Carter claimed President Donald Trump was “personally involved” in having Stephen Colbert’s show canceled based on Trump’s response to the series finale.
“It’s not a good development for the country, obviously,” Carter said on MS Now’s “The Weekend” on Saturday. “Certainly the idea that he throws a man in the dumpster at the end of it indicates that he was personally involved.”
Carter was referring to an AI-generated video posted on Trump’s official X account which featured Trump grabbing Colbert while on his show and throwing him into a large dumpster, dancing to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” after the act.
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Carter, who wrote the book “The Late Shift” based on former “Late Show” host David Letterman’s feud with “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno, was among several commentators who believed Trump’s ongoing feud with Colbert was a factor in the show’s end.
“The government was pushing to get rid of this man because he was a critic. And, you know, that is so alien to our values that I think most Americans — even people who are kind of neutral about it, maybe not his strong supporters — know this is not something we do. We don’t do that. We don’t shut people up because they criticize us. And I think everybody who has a sense of that realizes this was a bad situation that we are going to have to deal with on an ongoing basis,” Carter said.
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He went on to accuse CBS of capitulating to the Trump administration, claiming that most people no longer believe that the network’s decision to cancel the show was based on “financial purposes.”
“I think CBS, when they capitulated in the lawsuit that Trump filed against ‘60 Minutes,’ was sending a signal that they’re not going to be the independent journalism outfit that they should be. And not just giving up Colbert, but wiping out the time period, they basically said, we’re not even the same business anymore. We’re backing away. We’re giving up on this because maybe it would be too hard to hire somebody who wasn’t going to make jokes about the president,” Carter said.
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Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for comment.
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” aired its final episode on May 21. CBS announced the show’s cancellation last summer citing financial issues, a claim Colbert frequently denied. However, it was reported at the time that “The Late Show” was losing the network a whopping $40 million per year.
Colbert frequently targeted Trump in the final years of his show. A study from the Media Research Center found that Colbert made 3,639 jokes about President Donald Trump from Jan. 3, 2023, to his show’s end.
Fox News’ Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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