The Firing of Stephen Colbert and Hiring of TikTok. What’s the Deal?
- William Romanowski
- Oct 8
- 8 min read
October 2025
(8-minute read)
Keywords: TikTok, Stephen Colbert, Bytedance, Skydance, Paramount, Oracle Corporation
Actions and statements show the Trump Administration is mounting a two-prong attack on the American media:
silence critics, and
give billionaires aligned with the president’s agenda ownership of major media outlets.
Known as “media capture,” the aim is to transform existing media organizations and social media platforms “into tools of right-wing political influence and cultural control,” as one report put it.
The Saga of TikTok
TikTok has 170 million monthly U.S. users, about half (52%) of which say that’s where they regularly get their news. The popular short-form video-hosting service is owned by ByteDance, a company based in Beijing, China. Concerned about the Chinese government influencing content and getting access to user data, the U.S. federal government, the Army, the Navy, and over half these United States of America banned TikTok on government-issued devices, as did some cities and universities.
During his first term, citing national security (and in tune with his anti-China posture), Trump signed an executive order prohibiting TikTok usage in the United States. That ban was blocked in court. Bipartisan pressure swelled. In April 2024, President Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), which prohibited TikTok operations in the U.S. unless ByteDance divested ownership to a company without links to a foreign adversary.
TikTok countered with a lawsuit alleging the ban violated the free speech clause in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The U.S. Justice Department answered:
TikTok’s U.S. operations are ultimately subject to the direction of a Chinese company subject to Chinese laws; those operations require TikTok to share enormous amounts of U.S. users’ sensitive data with their Chinese-based counterparts; and China has specifically acted to maintain its ability to exercise control over TikTok
In a unanimous decision upholding the bipartisan legislation, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the government’s national security concerns outweighed the potential impact on free speech. (For the record, in 2009 China banned American social media platforms Facebook and YouTube as part of an internet censorship program known as the “Great Firewall of China.”)
Doing a Flip-Flop on TikTok
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump credited TikTok with boosting his support among young voters and reversed his position, pledging not to ban the popular video-sharing app.
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” Trump said. “But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
But according to commentators on both sides of the political spectrum, Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor with a large investment in ByteDance, had a lot to do with Trump’s flip-flop on TikTok. Yass made donations to a Trump-affiliated political group while the PAFACA legislation was making its way through Congress. And Trump indicated his new course shortly after a Mar-a-Largo meeting with Yass in March 2024 (though he denied talking with Yass about TikTok).
Right-wing political strategist Steve Bannon remarked: “Simple: Yass Coin.” And MSNBC’s liberal talk show host Chris Hays, said, “You don’t have to be a genius to put two and two together here. Yass visits, Trump announces he now opposes the ban.”
After his second inauguration, President Trump used executive orders to delay enforcement of PAFACA multiple times while allowing for negotiations of a “qualified divestiture” of TikTok to go forward.[1]
A Big Fat Bribe
In July 2025, CBS settled a $16 million lawsuit with Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Many legal expects deemed it to be a frivolous suit; advocates of press freedom believed CBS was “buckling to political pressure.”
In his opening monologue, Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’s The Late Show and a relentless critic of the president, labeled the network’s capitulation s “a big fat bribe.” It just so happened, Paramount Global, CBS’s owner, needed FCC (Federal Communications Commission) approval of an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
Two weeks later, CBS unexpectedly announced the network was cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the most watched late-night TV show. The next day Trump posted on Truth Social:
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!”[2]
If CBS’s rationale, “purely a financial decision” (late-night TV ratings have declined with the rise of streaming entertainment) seemed simply convenient, it did contain an element of truth. Syracuse University media professor Bob Thompson said, “I don’t think they were lying, because part of that financial decision was they wanted the [merger] deal to go through.”
Soon after, the FCC approved Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount Global and its subsidiaries, including the CBS network. In a statement, FCC chair Brendan Carr (a Trump appointee) said:
“Today’s decision also marks another step forward in the FCC’s efforts to eliminate invidious forms of DEI discrimination. And Skydance’s commitment to enhancing local news and reporting – coverage valued by the public – will also inure to the benefit of the American people.”
The Secret Sauce to Success
In September, U.S. and Chinese officials “greenlighted” the basic framework of a deal that would transfer ownership of TikTok to a U.S.-majority-owned entity. According to The Guardian:
American companies are expected to own about 65% of the U.S. version of the spun-off company, while ByteDance and Chinese investors will own less than 20%.
The new version of TikTok will be controlled by a seven-member board of directors made up of cybersecurity and national security experts, six of them Americans, according to the White House.
The group of American TikTok investors is led by the U.S. software giant Oracle, which will oversee TikTok’s U.S. operations, provide cloud service for user data storage and get a license to take control of the app’s algorithm.[3]
Oracle, Trump said, will play a “big” role in the new venture, not least managing TikTok’s algorithm, which one report referred to as TikTok’s “secret sauce to success [that] lets it deliver content however it wants.”
The cofounder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, is a friend and ally of Trump. It was his son David’s company, Skydance, that acquired Paramount during the scuffle over The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. According to The American Prospect, a left-leaning progressive magazine, in negotiating with the FCC, Ellison pledged to revamp CBS News by putting political conservatives in charge.[4]
Make It 100% MAGA?
Anyone who watches the news knows that Trump complains frequently about liberal media bias, employs the rhetoric of “fake news,” and has vilified the press as as "the enemy of the people." The way the TikTok episode unfolded, it’s no surprise he was asked if the U.S. spinoff would recommend more Maga-related content.
“If I could make it 100% MAGA, I would, but it’s not going to work out that way, unfortunately,” Trump said. “No, everyone’s going to be treated fairly. Every group, every philosophy, every policy will be treated very fairly.”
The Trump administration orchestrated transfer of ownership of U.S. operations of TikTok. From a Beijing-based company “subject to Chinese laws,” to one owned and operated by allies of the president, who would like to “make it 100% Maga-related.” As they say: the devil’s in the details.
Meanwhile, David Ellison is preparing to make a bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, “the media behemoth behind CNN, which would potentially bring the influential news network under the roof of an increasingly Trump-friendly conglomerate,” as The Guardian put it.
The question remains:
Do “we the people” want such a concentration of power – a global communication conglomerate in collusion with any presidential administration, let alone one that has made its authoritarian intentions plainly known?
I leave you with two quotations.
“The primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press was a similar one: to create a fourth institution outside the Government as an additional check on the three official branches.”
– Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice (1958 – 1981)
“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”
– Walter Cronkite, Anchor, CBS Evening News (1962 – 1981)
Additional Reading
For a conservative take on liberal bias in the media, see “Why Conservatives Should Be Optimistic About the Media.”
For a brief history of right-wing censorship, see, “We Have Seen the ‘Woke Right’ Before, and It Wasn’t Pretty Then, Either.”
Footnotes
[1] A “qualified divestiture” is a transaction that would allow a “foreign adversary controlled application” (like TikTok) to continue operating in the United States. For a divestiture to be qualified under this law, the U.S. President must determine through an interagency process that the transaction accomplishes two things:
The application is no longer controlled by a foreign adversary. For example, the Chinese company ByteDance would need to sell its stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations.
There is no operational relationship between the U.S. operations of the application and any formerly affiliated entities controlled by a foreign adversary. This includes severing ties related to the content recommendation algorithm and user data sharing (thanks to Google AI Overview).
[2] When controversy erupted over remarks Kimmel made after the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Brendan Carr suggested the talk show host should be suspended. In a scarcely concealed threat, Carr said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Citing the FCC’s power over licensing of TV and radio stations, Carr called on ABC affiliates not to carry Jimmy Kimmel Live! Disney-owned ABC pulled Kimmel’s show off the air, “indefinitely, then quickly reversed the decision. And after a day of blackout, the Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group restored Kimmel’s show to their local TV stations. Go figure. See “What to Know About the Suspension, and the Return, of Jimmy Kimmel’s Show,” New York Times, September 20, 2025, updated September 25, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/business/jimmy-kimmel-show-abc-kirk-fcc.html.
[3] The restructuring of TikTok still has to get regulatory approval by both governments and a full list of investors has not been released yet. Along with Oracle, other investors named include conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal), Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, Silver Lake, a tech-focused private equity firm, and MGX, a venture capital firm focused on AI and based in Abu Dhabi. Dan Whately and Sydney Bradley, “Here's what we know about who's buying TikTok's US business,” Business Insider, September 26, 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/who-could-take-over-tiktok-us-business-investors-oracle-ellison-2025-9.
[4] At this writing, Skydance also acquired The Free Press, described as a “right-of-center commentary site,” and installed its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss will report directly to Ellison while working with CBS News president Tom Cibrowski, who reports to George Cheeks, Paramount’s chair of TV Media. Axios described this as “the latest in a string of moves by Ellison to shift CBS News’ coverage to the right.” It remains to be seen what effect Weiss’s editorial philosophy will have on the storied CBS newsroom where legendary anchor Walter Cronkite was regularly cited in opinion polls as the “most trusted man in America.”
Photo Credits (in order of appearance)
Teenage Girls Recording Reels Themselves Outdoors Social Media, https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/young-teenage-girls-recording-reels-themselves-outdoors-social-media_32520807.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=40&uuid=a5aa0843-6c26-4641-ae55-6fa3c408637c&query=tiktok+users
Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Late_Night_with_Stephen_Colbert_Signage_(48047408166)
Oracle Corporation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_oracle.jpg
Warner Bros. Entertainment (Warner Bros. Discovery), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warner_Bros._Discovery.svg
 | William D. Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture and author of a number of books, including Reforming Hollywood: How Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies and Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. With his continuing commentary, he is trading footnotes for fiction, writing novels under the pen name (or nom de plume, as the French put it), Patmos Rhodes. |
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