While Stephen Colbert has received plenty of support from fellow television mainstays and late-night hosts following the unceremonious cancellation of The Late Show, Piers Morgan isn’t among them.
Earlier today, the British media personality took to X to slam Colbert and other longtime late-night hosts, alleging these figures were nothing more than puppets for the Democratic Party.
“This is so damning,” Morgan wrote alongside a cover of New York Post that outlined the political leanings of Colbert’s guests, which skewed toward the left. “Most of America’s biggest late-night hosts have become nothing more than hyper-partisan activist hacks for the Democrats — a party that’s rarely been more unpopular. No wonder Colbert got canned. More will follow.”
Morgan, who has alternately supported and critiqued president Donald Trump and does not consider himself right-wing, continued his commentary in several other tweets, beginning with an endorsement of Jay Leno’s recent comments questioning why late-night hosts would “alienate” half their audience by “cozying too much to one side or the other.”
The host of YouTube’s Piers Morgan Uncensored continued in another tweet, this time aimed at fellow U.K.-hailing peer John Oliver: “UPDATE: Just watched a drooling @60Minutes segment tonight about John Oliver who was proud of telling his viewers not to vote for Trump at last election. He told them to vote for Kamala Harris instead. That’s not comedy, it’s partisan political activism.”
And, when responding to a tweet by political commentator and MSNBC contributor Brian Tyler Cohen, Morgan stated, “Trump didn’t cancel Colbert… he cancelled himself with poor ratings, huge costs, and boring viewers with anti-Trump bias.”
Just a couple days after Stephen Colbert ripped into parent company Paramount‘s $16 million settlement with president Donald Trump on the air — a move he likened to a “big fat bribe” aimed to grease the Federal Trade Commission’s approval of a year-long pending merger between Paramount Global and David Ellison’s Skydance Media — he revealed to audiences that CBS would be axing The Late Show, the franchise first begun by host David Letterman in 1993. Executives defended the cancellation, calling it “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” that “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
Since Colbert made the shocking revelation public July 17, Trump has vocally celebrated the show’s retiring, as a majority of the show’s writers represented by the Writers Guild of America have called on New York State Attorney General Letitia James to launch an investigation into “potential wrongdoing” at Paramount. This comes as a number of Senate Democrats, like Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, made statements defending constituents’ right to know if the series was canceled due to political reasons.
In additional fallout, protesters gathered outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City where Colbert tapes to push back against the decision. As for Colbert himself, he has made it clear that he will not go gentle into that good night, telling Trump to “go f— himself.”
He added in the July 21 episode of his show, “But [CBS] made one mistake. They left me alive. Now for the next 10 months, the gloves are off. I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump. I don’t care for him. Doesn’t have the skillset to be president.”
