By Peter Kafka
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- Paramount and its new owners, Larry and David Ellison, have worked to win Donald Trump's favor.
- Donald Trump likes that, and says so out loud.
- But Paramount has also made deals to keep high-profile Trump critics on board: First "South Park," and now Jon Stewart.
After Paramount announced it was canceling Stephen Colbert's show last summer, his friend Jon Stewart responded with an "f-bomb-filled monologue" aimed at the company and the Trump administration. Stewart, like many others, believed Paramount pulled the plug on Colbert, a frequent Trump critic, for political reasons.
So it would be weird for Stewart, who is also a committed Trump critic, to stay on with Paramount after that. Right?
Nope: Stewart has re-signed with Paramount, and will continue hosting "The Daily Show" for the company through the end of 2026.
Which is another reminder that while the "David and Larry Ellison are tilting Paramount to the right to please Donald Trump" narrative has elements of truth to it, it's not necessarily the entire truth.
As I've noted before, Paramount has made multiple moves in the last year that seem designed to please Trump — or, in some cases, were made explicitly to please Trump and his administration. Some of them were made under the Ellisons' ownership, and some were made as previous owner Shari Redstone was finalizing a deal to sell the company to the Ellisons.
Among them: Paying Trump $16 million to settle what should have been a spurious lawsuit over a "60 Minutes" interview; agreeing to dispense with DEI initiatives; hiring an ombudsman with conservative credentials to oversee complaints about supposed bias at CBS News; and acquiring Bari Weiss' Free Press and installing Weiss as editor in chief at CBS News.
And Donald Trump has definitely noticed those efforts. He has repeatedly praised the Ellisons and their ownership, including during a recent interview with … "60 Minutes".
The Ellisons, meanwhile, are counting on Trump's blessing if they move forward with plans to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. "We have a good relationship with the administration," David Ellison noted last month.
On the other hand! Before Ellison formally took over Paramount, he agreed to a $1.5 billion deal to lock down "South Park" — a show that has gone out of its way to mock Trump this year. Now he has re-signed another super high-profile Trump opponent.
And while many people, including Colbert himself, believe he's a victim of political appeasement, we've yet to see anything beyond circumstantial evidence for that argument. Paramount itself has said it canceled the show for financial reasons, which seems at the very least plausible, given the decline of late-night TV.
There's also the fact that Colbert is still on the air, and will remain there through next spring. So he's not exactly being silenced.
Which brings us back to Stewart. If Paramount really were purging its Trump critics, it wouldn't be signing him to another contract.
So yes: The Ellisons clearly want Trump's approval. But they also want an audience. Which means they'll pay Trump $16 million one month and Jon Stewart the next — and keep hoping they can satisfy both.
