The musician and former *Late Show* bandleader reflected on his years alongside Colbert, joining a wave of celebrities questioning whether the cancellation was driven purely by finances or by deeper political and corporate pressures.

Jon Batiste, the Grammy- and Oscar-winning musician who once stood nightly in the pit at the Ed Sullivan Theater as bandleader and musical director for *The Late Show with Stephen Colbert*, has thrown himself into the growing chorus of outrage over CBS’s decision to end the storied *Late Show* franchise next May—and he did not mince words.

In a new interview conducted as Batiste prepares to release his forthcoming album *BIG MONEY*, the musician framed the network’s move as not merely a business decision but as a symptom of a larger corrosion: corporations with deep pockets who can, in effect, buy silence.

CBS made the formal announcement in mid-July that it would retire *The Late Show* in May 2026, telling employees and the public that the step was “purely a financial decision” taken against a challenging late-night landscape.

The network emphasized that the move was not tied to the program’s performance or content, calling Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and praising his decade on the desk.

Colbert, who learned of the decision the night before a taping, relayed the news to his live audience with a stunned theater full of boos and the flat, raw line: “Next year will be our last season.”

The revelation set off one of the swiftest and most rancorous debates about corporate power and editorial independence in recent media memory.

What followed was less a quiet administrative pivot than a public reckoning. Late-night peers rallied to Colbert’s side, with on-camera cameos and pointed statements from figures across the comedy landscape;

Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and others staged visible shows of support and, in some cases, blunt condemnation of the perceived forces behind the cancellation.

David Letterman—the host who built *The Late Show* into a headline institution and who passed the torch to Colbert in 2015—posted archival clips lampooning his former network in a move widely read as an endorsement of Colbert’s plight.

Protests and demonstrations cropped up outside the Ed Sullivan Theater and across social media, where the argument hardened into two competing narratives:

CBS’s finance-first explanation versus critics who say the timing and the company’s recent settlement with a powerful political figure point to pressure that goes beyond simple bottom-line calculations.

Batiste’s critique landed in that fraught seam. Asked about the network’s reasoning, he offered one of the clearest, most emotionally charged formulations:

“We’re in a time where the right price can silence the voice of free speech, which we should be very, very conscious of,” he said, explicitly tying the closing of one of America’s longest-running late-night platforms to the influence of “big money.”

For Batiste—who spent seven seasons playing with Colbert, helping to shape the show’s musical DNA from its 2015 relaunch through his departure in 2022—the episode is personal.

He describes the bond that developed the night he first met Colbert eleven years ago and the years that followed as formative, artistic, and, crucially, collaborative.

Batiste is not speaking from the margins. His career credentials—including multiple Grammy wins, an Academy Award for his work on the Pixar film *Soul*, and an expansive discography—gave weight to his argument that this is about more than television scheduling.

He is also in the middle of a moment of his own: his new album *BIG MONEY* is slated for release later this month, a project he teased as a return to roots and a meditation on power, music, and money—an ironic counterpoint to his comments about Colbert’s fate.

Batiste’s dual status as an artist with institutional bona fides and someone who left the weekly late-night grind lends his words a mixture of inside knowledge and moral urgency.

The context around the cancellation has made the conversation combustible.

In the weeks before the announcement, Colbert used his opening monologue to sharply criticize Paramount, CBS’s corporate parent, for what he described as a troubling settlement with a prominent political figure—language that many viewers and industry observers interpreted as suggesting editorial influence and corporate self-protection.

The settlement and Paramount’s larger merger efforts have fed a theory—voiced in opinion pages and on the airwaves—that business calculus and political appeasement have, in the end, triumphed over the show’s cultural value.

For viewers who have watched late-night hosts routinely push the envelope on politics and power for decades, the optics are ugly: a show that regularly held the powerful to account will simply cease to exist on the public airwaves.

Colbert himself has been defiant and unbowed. After announcing the decision to the theater, he made it clear that he would not be “replaced” and, in the face of boos, leaned into the moment with a mix of gratitude and rage, teasing potential next steps—including public invitations toward audacious career pivots.

Colbert has even courted streaming platforms in satire, quipping, “Netflix, call me. I’m available in June,” while also doubling down on the work that made him a nightly staple: sharp political satire, character-driven comedy, and interviews that aim to both amuse and unsettle.

That very mix, critics say, may have made him an inconvenient tenant in an era of heightened corporate caution.

What does it mean when a cultural institution goes dark? For Batiste, the answer is immediate and practical: artists must keep fighting for the ability to speak and to perform work that reflects their “authentic truth.”

He tied free speech not to an abstract right but to the economic ecosystems that either nourish or throttle it.

Across his conversation, he returned to memory after memory of life on Colbert’s show—the opening night nerves, the late-night rituals, the funny backstage chords, and the human warmth that undergirded the work—and he stressed that the decision will extinguish more than a desk and a band: it will shutter a nightly forum in which comedy and music together held civic life to account.

As for what comes next, the industry is watching. Colbert’s on-air persona and his public profile make him an attractive candidate for streaming, specials, tours, or even a reinvention in cable or direct-to-consumer formats; his peers have suggested he will not be silenced.

Batiste, in the meantime, is stepping forward with *BIG MONEY*, a record and tour that—intentionally or not—arrives under the shadow of his recent remarks.

For audiences who have watched Batiste at Colbert’s side and will now watch the show’s final season, the scene is bittersweet: a farewell to a fixture and a reminder that the machinery behind culture can be a swirl of creative energy and cold accounting at once.

Whatever the motive behind CBS’s move—a reshuffling of late-night economics or something darker—the story has crystallized a debate about who gets to speak on national platforms and under what constraints.

Batiste’s language makes that debate moral as much as professional: “The right price,” he warns, “can silence the voice of free speech.”

Whether that is a permanent silencing or a temporary shuttering that prompts a migration of talent to new stages remains to be seen, but for now the Ed Sullivan Theater will carry the echoes of a show that, for many Americans, was a nightly reminder that humor and criticism can be a civic practice as well as entertainment.

Jon Batiste, for one, is watching, speaking, and making new music—and he says he will not let the conversation end with a network memo.