Stephen Colbert praised South Park for its provocative season 27 premiere as his own show faces the axe for criticizing President Donald Trump. The show’s episode featured an AI clip of President Donald Trump stripping naked in the desert.

The White House is fighting back against what it calls “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” targeting satirical media and political talk shows.View on euronews

The FCC still hasn’t approved the Paramount-Skydance merger, which may be where Colbert joins the saga. The cheeky host roasts Trump regularly on his show and is far more political than David Letterman, whom he replaced in 2015. On July 14, Colbert called the Paramount payment to Trump involving "60 Minutes" a “ big, fat bribe ,” on CBS’s own air.

Like Stephen Colbert, the Smothers Brothers enjoyed top ratings, and they had a history of refusing to avoid sensitive topics, regularly airing anti-Vietnam War and pro-civil rights segments at a time when such material was scarce on network television.

There’s a new entrant in the annals of corporate hole-digging: Media titan Paramount, which owns CBS, recently said it’s canceling the top-rated "Late Show with Stephen Colbert." Paramount said it needs to cancel the Colbert show for “financial reasons” and leaked reports likely sourced to the company suggest the show loses around $40 million per year.

In his Puck newsletter this week, Matt Belloni, Hollywood’s insider du jour, predicted a landslide Emmy victory for Stephen Colbert. “Now a comedy martyr,” Belloni wrote, “Colbert is a shoo-in to beat rivals The Daily Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the three-horse race to win his first series Emmy for Late Show .”

When Stephen Colbert became a financial disaster for CBS, its execs fired him. For good measure, they also killed the “The Late Show,” the network’s failing 33-year-old flag-ship late-night program. CBS could have axed Colbert now and replaced him with a cheaper host from Hollywood’s limitless stable of professional Trump haters.

The late-night legend took aim at his former network home and David Ellison's media company, speculating that Colbert's show was canceled for political reasons.