By Lisa Van Dusen

May 4, 2026

“In pre-2016 American politics, reporters and comedians generally coexisted in the content space taken up by the five to 10 percent of politics that veered regularly into the downright absurd. That percentage has now shot up to 90, and the war on truth has put us in the same foxhole.”

Breaking my rule of never quoting myself, but those lines are from a column of mine from February 2017, one month after Donald Trump’s first inauguration.

Since then, American democracy has experienced the respite of four years of Joe Biden, which not so much reinstated normal working conditions in journalism and comedy as slowed the slide of both towards the self-silencing and camouflaged censorship that afflict humanity whenever democracy gives way to creeping autocracy.

The war on democracy that has been waged not just in the United States as the democratic superpower but across the world throughout this century has included a war on truth — largely via inundation per the tsunami of industrialized bullsh*t unleashed as a weapon of mass destruction and a transformative means to various otherwise unachievable ends over the past two decades.

As both a columnist and editor — especially as an editor trained on wire service desks in Washington and New York when American wire services served as the baseline of political fact and truth — I’ve witnessed the evolution of that process through both the economic decimation of mainstream journalism and the related colonization of the media sphere by propaganda.

Meanwhile, as journalism has become incrementally, systematically corrupted as a source of truth, comedy has picked up much of the slack of accurately representing an increasingly preposterous operational assault — more of a vendetta, really — on the democratic status quo and its norms, institutions, standards and human rights protections.

Comedians who work at the level of U.S. network late-night talk-show hosts excel at a skill that has become more valuable and therefore more powerful since the degradation of democracy and politics began to seriously snowball in the post-Obama era: they’re very good at — per that opening quote — translating and contextualizing absurdity for a mass audience.

So much of what’s unfolding today on our screens, in our timelines, in both what gets reported and what doesn’t, is so breathtakingly absurd, cynical, and contemptuous of humanity’s capacity for suspension of disbelief that the late-night comedians have become the voices of not just reason but of sanity.

In the process of deconstructing for laughs that vein of ludicrousness that now runs through our besieged politics, they reassure the audience that, in fact, these are not normal times, that they’re entirely right to respond to events with shock and revulsion, and that resistance in the form of basic truth-telling — including for laughs — is alive and well, which means there’s still hope.

Which is why the cancellation of Late Night with Stephen Colbert is so much more important than it might otherwise be.

Colbert had hosted the highest-rated late-night show for nearly a decade when CBS announced on July 17th, 2025, that his contract would not be renewed in May 2026. His last show will air on Thursday, May 21st.

In an atmosphere of increasingly brazen and corrupt censorship, intimidation — legal and otherwise — and corporate coercion, comedians are as imperilled as journalists, simply because they tell the truth.

What amounted to Colbert’s firing was attributed by CBS to the cost of the show. “Still, many have been skeptical of CBS’s explanation,” per the April 28th New York Times piece by John Koblin, Stephen Colbert Gets Ready to Hang it Up.

“At the time, Paramount, CBS’s parent company, was closing a multibillion-dollar merger with the movie studio Skydance, a deal that required the Trump administration’s approval,” writes Koblin. “Two weeks before the cancellation was announced, Paramount agreed to pay Mr. Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, a suit that many lawyers described as meritless. Mr. Colbert had been a sharp critic of Mr. Trump for over a decade.”

In his Times interview, Colbert acknowledges the political context of his removal — a context that began to smack of a purge two months later when Colbert’s counterpart at ABC, Jimmy Kimmel, was suspended over a bit about murdered MAGA media personality Charlie Kirk.

“Authoritarians don’t like anybody who doesn’t give them undue dignity,” Colbert told Koblin. Comedians are anti-authoritarian by nature. And authoritarians are never going to like anybody to laugh at them. The number of newspeople who have said to me or Jon Stewart or any of the guys who do this, ‘God, I wish I could say what you say on air.’ And we can. I think that upsets them. I think it might be upsetting that we really do not live in their world of principalities and powers.”

In her interview with Kimmel last week for the newly released The Devil Wears Prada 2, Meryl Streep opened by thanking him for “carrying the banner of freedom of the press”. No, Kimmel is not a journalist, but the human rights conflation is apt. In an atmosphere of increasingly brazen and corrupt censorship, intimidation — legal and otherwise — and corporate coercion, comedians are as imperilled as journalists, simply because they tell the truth.

To get a sense of what Colbert’s departure is worth to America’s anti-democracy interests, one has only to imagine the specific combination of comedic commentary and political point of view he has provided being suddenly notable for its absence.

Since Trump’s first term and throughout the COVID pandemic, when Colbert, Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers served as emotional support comics to a confined continent, the two hours from 11:30 to 1:30 have been a safe space for cathartic irreverence and absurdity-translating public service in a time of unprecedented collective anxiety.

That tradition of late-night comedy interpreting society back to itself in troubled political times goes back to Jack Paar interviewing Bobby Kennedy in 1964 about his brother’s assassination and Johnny Carson handing his show over to Harry Belafonte for a week as a statement about Civil Rights in 1968. It includes James Baldwin’s appearance on Dick Cavett a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and Cavett’s landmark show that aired 24 hours after Robert Kennedy’s assassination two months later.

That Colbert has become a political figure in his own right — not for being partisan but for channelling the common sense and decency of most Americans as observers to their country’s hijacking — has made him more powerful than his job description.

And at a time when anti-democracy power consolidation includes the elimination of any sources of power that cannot be corrupted, coerced or co-opted, that power is one reason why Stephen Colbert is hosting his final show on May 21st.

Colbert’s looming absence, and what it represents as a statement about free speech and both power and abuse of power, is a product of far more than talent churn. And it will leave a much larger void than one empty chair.

There is an America we love. That America still exists, and it is being drowned out, obscured, misrepresented and undermined — not just by the amplification of lies, but by the silencing of truth.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.