AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in Denver. Juan González is in Chicago.

Well, the late-night comedian Stephen Colbert signed off last night for the final time as host of The Late Show on CBS. Special guests on that final broadcast included Paul McCartney, who performed The Beatles’ classic “Hello, Goodbye,” with help from Colbert and Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste and others.

Over the past 11 years, Stephen Colbert was one of the most vocal critics of President Trump on network TV. His show was canceled last July after he criticized CBS’s parent company Paramount for agreeing to pay $16 million to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by President Trump. The settlement came as Paramount was seeking the Trump FCC — that’s the Federal Communications — approval for a merger with Skydance. This is part of what Colbert said at the time.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Now, I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s “big fat bribe,” because this all comes as Paramount’s owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance.

AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration approved the Paramount-Skydance merger just a week after CBS announced Colbert’s ouster. At the time, CBS [said] Colbert was canceled for, quote, “financial reasons,” even though Colbert had been consistently the top-rated late-night host.

Last year, Trump wrote online, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” unquote. Early this morning at 1:52 a.m. Eastern, President Trump posted a message online again, celebrating the end of Colbert’s show, writing, quote, “Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” unquote.

In March, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, celebrated the cancellation of Colbert’s show as part of a broader Trump-led campaign against the news media. This is Carr speaking at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

BRENDAN CARR: President Trump took on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning. Look at the results so far: PBS defunded, NPR defunded, Joy Reid gone from MSNBC, “Sleepy-Eyed” Chuck Todd gone, Jim Acosta gone, John Dickerson gone. Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership. And soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this week, one of Stephen Colbert’s final guests, Bruce Springsteen, directly criticized President Trump and the Ellison family, David and Larry Ellison, which now controls Paramount.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: I’m here in support tonight for Stephen, because you’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we got a president who can’t take a joke, and because — because Larry and David Ellison feel they need the kiss his [bleep] to get what they want. So, these are — anyway, Stephen, these are small-minded people who got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Bruce Springsteen this week, one of the final guests of Stephen Colbert.

And right now the Ellisons, with Paramount Skydance, are trying to merge, in a more than $100 billion megamerger, with Warner Bros. Discovery. Warner Bros. Discovery owns HBO, owns CNN. And, of course, Paramount owns CBS. So, CNN, CBS, HBO would all be under the same roof.

To talk more about the end of Stephen Colbert’s show, Trump’s threats to the press and media consolidation, we’re joined here in Denver by David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever. His recent book is titled Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.

David, how does this fit into your view of corruption in the United States? How does the final show of Colbert, though the most-watched show on late night, being canceled and him being ousted, connect to these megamergers that are consolidating the media?

DAVID SIROTA: Well, I think it’s a data point in a number of data points. I mean, the Colbert tale that you just told, also there was a concurrent situation with Jimmy Kimmel and a merger about local TV stations, the Tegna-Nexstar merger. Jimmy Kimmel had said something that apparently Brendan Carr and the Trump administration and the MAGA movement didn’t like after the death of — the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the television network faced pressure from Carr and others to essentially throw Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

So, I think we see this over and over again, where the Trump administration is weaponizing its power over mergers to try to get what it wants in the media space. And I think that’s a — I wouldn’t call that a new level of corruption. We saw the Nixon administration, quite famously, back in the day, try to weaponize its merger approval process on behalf of its allies and its donors, as well. But it is a resurrected tactic from the Nixon era that is a kind of corruption that’s outside of, frankly, the traditional kinds of corruption that we’ve gotten used to. I mean, traditional corruption that we talk about in Master Plan and we document in Master Plan is about legalizing campaign contributions. This is actually weaponizing, as you mentioned, lawsuits where Trump is trying to extract money from various large corporations, using the merger approval process potentially as a tool to extract those settlements and extract financial remuneration to Donald Trump himself.

And I think, ultimately, as it affects the media situation, it creates a chilling effect, right? I mean, everybody who is currently working in media, certainly for big corporations that may have business before the Trump administration, everybody knows that they, in what they’re doing, whether it’s reporting or commentary or anything else, that they may get crosswise with Donald Trump, and the corporate boss may not like that, because the corporate boss may have business with the Trump administration. So, I think beyond just a sort of heavy-handed censorship problem, you have a potential self-censorship problem. And I think that’s actually, arguably, the point from the Trump administration and people like Brendan Carr, to send a chilling effect message to the entire media and the entire political discourse.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, David, meanwhile, six Democratic senators sent a letter to the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, demanding that he conduct a rigorous and thorough review of Paramount’s reliance on foreign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost — to pay for almost $110 billion to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. In the past, the federal government has really been strict about the limits of foreign ownership or investment in American media companies. What’s happening here in terms of the foreign — foreign control regulations of the FCC?

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. There’s reporting that says that the FCC may approve up to a 49-and-a-half percent ownership, or even ultimately up to 100% ownership, foreign ownership, of the new merged Paramount-Warner Bros. corporation, if the merger goes through. They’re asking, essentially, the FCC to waive long-standing ownership laws. And to be clear, let’s remember, Brendan Carr of the FCC wrote parts of the Project 2025 document, the document setting the agenda for Trump’s second term, in which Carr said that he wanted to get rid of ownership caps.

Now, obviously, this conflicts with the whole notion of America first that you hear Trump talking all about, where we are potentially going to have the largest or among the largest media conglomerates in the country — in the world, but operating in our country, affecting the democratic discourse, that is in part or up to potentially fully owned by foreign sovereign wealth funds, controlled in part by foreign governments. I mean, it kind of boggles the mind about what that means for our democracy, right? Because media corporations, as distinct from, you know, a corporation that just makes a physical product — media corporations have a disproportionate impact on the democratic — small-D democratic — and election discourse. Now, in the future, you may have a situation where foreign governments via sovereign wealth funds have a disproportionate power to affect the way we conduct our United States, American democracy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: There’s also a new report that James Murdoch has recently agreed to acquire New York magazine and Vox Media Podcast Network in a deal valued at about $300 million. Talk about who James Murdoch is and his impact.

DAVID SIROTA: Yeah, I mean, James Murdoch is — you know, he’s part of the Murdoch family, but he has had kind of an ouster or a kind of conflict, reportedly, with Rupert Murdoch and with Lachlan Murdoch, and essentially left Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And James Murdoch has been depicted as somebody with more moderate, Democratic-leaning politics. And now he is investing in sort of independent, somewhat independent media properties, and making a play for that. I mean, I think we will see what that means.

My concern on that is somewhat less about James Murdoch’s politics and more about the fact that digital media and podcast media have been some of the last remaining places where there really has been some vibrant independent, non-corporate media. And so, the concern would be: Is that going away? Is that space now going to be even more encroached by corporate, large corporate entities? But I do think the jury remains out on that. It’s not clear how James Murdoch is going to run that company.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, David Sirota, this is a conversation that continues, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, author of The Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.

David, I look forward to seeing you Saturday at the KGNU benefit at the Sie Center, the cinema here in Denver. They’re screening Steal This Story, Please!, about Democracy Now! and independent media. The fundraiser is at 4:30, I think, the film at 6:30 on Saturday night. And you can check that out at KGNU.org. But I’m also thrilled to be going to the ribbon-cutting ceremony of KGNU, a gem in the community radio network in this country. It’s taking place in Boulder today at 1:00. It is moving into its own community and cultural center and resilience hub. And it is amazing to see, as we look at corporate media consolidating the growth of independent media. Also, Steal This Story, Please! is playing in Denver at the Sie Center for the next week, and in Boulder at the Dairy cinema. We did a fundraiser for KGNU there last night, and it will continue to play through the week. Just check out democracynow.org and also StealThisStory.org.

Well, speaking about corporate power, coming up, Karen Hao, the author of Empire of AI.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Hog of the Forsaken” by the late folk musician Michael Hurley, performing in Democracy Now!’s studios.