Intro for July 25, 2025

Dear Gossips,   

Well, that didn’t take long. Just eight days after announcingThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end next May, and less than a month after CBS paid $16 million to Donald Trump to end a specious lawsuit over an interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes, the FCC has approved the merger between Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and Skydance. This is why Paramount executives will never beat the allegations that cancelling Colbert was, at least in part, a political decision.

In a dissenting statement, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez blasted Paramount for “cowardly capitulation”, which includes “eliminating DEI” at Paramount, and appointing an ombudsman for CBS News to “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns” at the network. Fox News wasn’t enough, CBS News must also now serve the administration via a constant stream of propaganda, I guess.

Much like Fox before it, Paramount was floundering and likely would have gone under without a merger of some kind, but this is basically the worst-case scenario, with a major network kowtowing to a spiteful president, all but ensuring they will neuter their once legendary news service so as not to further annoy him. At this point, maybe letting legacy studios die actually IS the better option.

But what about the South Park of it all, you may ask? Season 27 premiered two days ago with the animated series’ most memorably scathing satire in recent or middle-distance memory, excoriating Donald Trump as they once excoriated Saddam Hussein. This coming just days after South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone closed a $1.5 billion deal with Paramount, but the White House shrugged it off with a statement that read in part: “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention”.

If South Park makes a point of staying on Trump throughout its new season, maybe he’ll eventually get annoyed, but right now, they’re not wrong in pointing out that “the left” hasn’t been super friendly to South Park for years (the show falls into a “both sides are the same” nihilism that has done a huge amount of damage to not only political discourse but political understanding, because no, they ARE NOT the same, recent events should be proof enough of that). But if they keep pushing the Trump button, I’m sure he’ll start getting a lot more irritated and maybe try to exert pressure on the new Paramount-Skydance entity to do something about it. Never forget that Skydance CEO David Ellison’s dad, Larry Ellison, is tight with Trump.

For now, though, this saga appears to be done. Paramount and Skydance will complete their merger in the next few weeks, Stephen Colbert will go off the air next spring, CBS News will probably get pretty dire, maybe South Park decides to become a cultural thorn in Trump’s side, maybe not, and we’re all a little poorer today, culturally and informationally, than we were yesterday. Well, except for the billionaires at the top. They will just get richer. 

Live long and gossip,

Sarah