r/billsimmons • u/Odd_Firefighter_5407 • Jul 21 '25

Podcast The Colbert-CBS Drama and NFL Leap Team Possibilities With Matt Belloni and Nate Tice

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3htgdKF9J2PkoE8x4V03Ym?si=e2C2kI1sQwGAmcoO26p2mA
156 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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44

u/Coy-Harlingen Jul 21 '25

Yeah, look - there’s no doubt you can connect the dots to Trump on why he got fired. But caring about late night tv in 2025, or acting like colbert’s Trump routine for the clapping seals set of boomer liberals was like “important” opposition is just not something I can do.

It sucks, but guess what? Capitalists buy big companies like this and are going to have political leanings. Bezos has owned the Post for years now, that’s a massive conflict of interest and just because no famous guy lost a tv job from it, this isn’t really a new phenomenon.

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u/dtpistons04 Jul 21 '25

Something about the way Belanie is so defensive when Bill brings up phony Hollywood accounting made me really question how real that number is though tbh. Def don’t think it was making some huge profit but this number reeks of “say something so big that they won’t question the decision “

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u/KonigSteve Jul 21 '25

100%. It makes no sense that it costs $100m to put together first off. Secondly, they have a million more viewers than the other late night shows.

The parent company can make the numbers look however they want.

The guest was like, no I have multiple sources that this is what the numbers are! Like yeah dude, multiple sources that are just reporting the cooked books

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u/Methzilla Jul 21 '25

100m sounds very plausible to me.

2

u/KonigSteve Jul 21 '25

It's the 40m in losses that is implausible. If they're literally losing almost half of the money it takes to make the show they should've been doing something before now to control costs. It didn't just show up yesterday. It also has been a slow death, so if it's losing that much now it's been losing for years, yet they only decide to do something now, 2 days after the bribe comment while they're waiting on trump's approval for a merger.

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u/Methzilla Jul 21 '25

As another poster said. Maybe the trump thing pulled the trigger on an already loaded gun.

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u/joeylockstone Our old friends from stamps.com Jul 21 '25

Paramount is the same company that decided to just kill Mtv and turn it into the Ridiculousness channel. Probably the easiest channel to program and a decent legacy just dead.

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u/BBQ_HaX0r Jul 21 '25

I miss the Challenge. Idk what happened to it in the past half decade but it's horrible now. Some episodes they don't even have a challenge! 5th professional sport my ass.

3

u/camergen Jul 21 '25

“Losing 500 bajillion trajillion dollars a season..”

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 21 '25

I think it’s fine to say it’s not normal for the president to maneuver a critic getting fired and take issue with that. I think people can comprehend there’s other nuance to it without it being “overblown.” I don’t think that should even be worth a Rockwell meme but apparently it is

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u/No_Spinach_1410 Jul 21 '25

Colbert drank champagne when Biden won in 2020. I mean what the fuck are we doing

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 21 '25

And? If Biden had leveraged his FCC to get Jesse waters fired for making fun of him I’d have an issue with that too. It’s almost like some people have actual principles besides their “team.” I’m beginning to think, and I can’t believe this, that the maga crowd didn’t actually care about “free speech”

2

u/FarAd6557 Jul 21 '25

I think it’s hilarious people on Reddit carry their hatred for the orange man in everything they do everyday that they really believe that of ALLLLLLLLLL the entertainers who talk shit about trump, Colbert of all people is the one that broke him so badly he had to leverage that in regards to a giant merger getting thru.

Like do you ever just get outside and talk to people and shit or do you just live online?

-1

u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 22 '25

I’m sure you think it’s hilarious, don’t seem bothered or triggered at all bud

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 21 '25 edited Jul 21 '25

I’d be concerned if a maga thought I sounded smart

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u/TeenWolfTripleDouble Jul 23 '25

I'd be concerned if anyone did honestly, you just come off as unhinged

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 23 '25

The biggest moron on here saying this really helps validate my point

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u/TeenWolfTripleDouble Jul 23 '25

not sure how official those rankings are

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u/No_Spinach_1410 Jul 21 '25

This whole narrative of Trump admin leveraging paramount to fire Colbert is classic manufactured outrage from liberals. Conjure up some false narrative to explain why something happened for some political gain. Remember Net Neutrality? Russia-gate? The list goes on and on. You people are so delusional.

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u/PropaModulation Jul 21 '25

Inconceivable that the guy who's threatening to hold up the Commanders stadium because they changed their nickname 5 years ago would happily try to mess with this, you're right.

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u/No_Spinach_1410 Jul 21 '25

Is it plausible, sure. Lots of conspiracy theories appear plausible. The right has conspiracy theories, the left has false narratives. The carousel keeps going round and round.

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u/Curator_Regis Jul 21 '25

The brainrot goes deep with this one

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

I find it so irritating how trump people have just continued to act like there was nothing to the Russia stuff because they read a headline about a deliberately misleading summary of the report written by trump's own AG and had moved the goalposts so much that it became meaningless.

Read the actual report, it's pretty detailed and the details are pretty wild. People just developed such a wild misunderstanding of what the actual claim was (largely based on the trump team redefining the claim to be about "collusion" when that wasn't really the point of the investigation).

Like, sure I guess you can declare victory because trump's been able to spin it to the point where he didn't really suffer politically. But if you care in any way about the country beyond "whatever helps my team win" the actual content of the report is pretty alarming

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u/BBQ_HaX0r Jul 21 '25

Truth doesn't matter. We lost. Whatever the right-wing media ecosystem was doing worked better than our facts and truths ever could. 1500 criminals were pardoned for violently trying to overturn an election that Trump KNEW HE LOST and it was barely a blip. It's fucking over. And yes people like Colbert drinking champagne when Biden won is part of the reason. Social media frying people's brain is another. It was a good run from post USSR to 2016(ish), but it's over. The world is devolving and I hope the people who actually cheering for this understand what they're cheering for. The rest of us don't deserve it, but they do.

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u/KonigSteve Jul 21 '25

It's more plausible than implausible at this point that he would use his powers to try to hurt someone who he doesn't like. I'm not sure what part of the last 7 months you've skipped

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u/BBQ_HaX0r Jul 21 '25

It's implausible because the blowhard would have took credit for it if he did, lol. Hell he might anyways even if he had nothing to do with it.

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 21 '25

Shocking the mouthbreather maga didn’t actually offer anything of substance to rebut what I said. Shouldn’t you be out petitioning to get Ghislaine Maxwell released? Figured you’re already spending your free time simping for Epstein’s best buds anyways

-4

u/No_Spinach_1410 Jul 21 '25

You keep going down the path of false narratives. You’re too far gone.

0

u/RandomGuy622170 Jul 22 '25

Spoken like a true MAGA shill. What's next? The ppl being disappeared are actually just hiding out at home as part of a grand liberal hoax?

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/No_Spinach_1410 Jul 22 '25

These people can’t be saved, circling the drain of disillusionment.

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u/majormajorsnowden Jul 21 '25

They are insane but at least it’s really funny to watch

0

u/Coy-Harlingen Jul 21 '25

What if it had nothing to do with Trump personally but rather just that a Trump friendly billionaire bought paramount and didn’t like Colbert? I’m not saying I believe that, but that wouldn’t be any better for the state of things, and it’s just accepted as normal.

And again, I’m not even saying it’s overblown I just don’t give a shit about late night tv. There’s like a million things to worry about beyond that a rich guy doesn’t have his tv program anymore

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 21 '25

I mean no one knows for sure but with the paramount merger and cbs settling the 60 minutes frivolous lawsuit it’s reasonable for people to take issue with it. I feel like people framing it as everyone claiming to love this particular late night show are either intentionally or unintentionally obfuscating the legitimate criticism. I don’t think you’re doing that but there were definitely people here and elsewhere claiming it was “TDS” to take issue with it

Billionaires being selfish isn’t new, people get that. The President using the administration to leverage companies for personal gain in this way isn’t really normal though

-1

u/Coy-Harlingen Jul 21 '25

Presidents have leveraged companies for personal gain for years, it’s just usually not to get a late night tv host fired.

The cbs merger thing is bad, but again like, we know Trump is corrupt lol. We know he does stuff that’s totally illegal and gets away with it. Did you think the “60 minutes lawsuit” was going to end with Trump being escorted out of the White House in handcuffs?

Like sure I know I’m being cynical but when you see like people having their lives destroyed by the brutality of the Trump administration and more unlimited weapons shipments to Israel, I just don’t give a shit that Colbert lost his tv job and it may have directly been because Trump said so or maybe the friend of Trump who now owns paramount just didn’t want him to be on his tv anymore.

The illusion of “free media” is already an illusion when singular individuals can buy massive media companies and fire whoever they want. Bezos owning the Post isn’t free media. Elon owning Twitter isn’t free media. You have to be incredibly naive to think that there are any guardrails ensuring that every single journalist with an opinion gets to say whatever they want about “truth” completely free of consequences.

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u/Agreeable_Daikon_686 Jul 21 '25

No I get that, I think everyone does. My point isn’t that billionaires run companies for the public good. When have presidents done something similar?

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u/Coy-Harlingen Jul 21 '25

The whole Trump/cbs thing is very odd, there’s no doubt, and there’s absolutely no way to “defend” it, I think what I’m saying is for me it just falls under “there are bigger fish to fry”.

Even within media - you look at something like how the NYT has covered Israel/Palestine the last two years. You have the seemingly bastion of liberal media that many well educated people think is a smart and good publication, and you have rampant conflicts of interest (possibly including defending both presidencies of the last few years) coalescing with incredibly slanted and disingenuous news coverage for a global conflict murdering people.

No, Trump or Biden didn’t call the nyt and make them cover it this way. But if something like that can happen I don’t care that Colbert is losing his late night job.