As you may know, the television network CBS has announced that it will be taking The Late Show With Stephen Colbert off the air.

What’s happening here matters whether or not you watch Colbert’s show — or any other late night program — so please keep reading.

Many people have reached the seemingly obvious conclusion that CBS is capitulating to Donald Trump’s relentless whining about being made fun of by late night talk show hosts and other comedians. (If Trump’s skin were any thinner, we could see the blood struggling to squeeze through his clogged arteries.)

And it would be bad enough if CBS were “just” caving in to Trump’s bullying and narcissism, as other major media companies, giant corporations, storied universities, and blue chip law firms have done.

But it’s even worse than that.

• See, CBS wants to sell itself to another massive company, Skydance Media, for $8 billion. (Skydance, by the way, is run by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, who is currently* the second-richest person on Earth and an enormous Trump supporter.) And that deal can’t go through without approval from — wait for it — the Trump administration.

• Earlier this year, CBS agreed to “settle” a lawsuit brought against it by Trump — a lawsuit that was widely regarded as utterly baseless — by funneling $16 million to Trump’s supposed presidential library. (This is the same ruse Trump used to accept a “gift” of a $400 million luxury jet from the ruling family of Qatar.) Colbert called the CBS settlement “a big fat bribe.”

• Then — just days after CBS canceled Colbert — Trump announced that Skydance in turn has agreed to provide him $20 million worth of air time on top of the $16 million he extracted from CBS. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said on rival network MSNBC: “This looks a lot, smells a lot, sounds a lot like you’re purchasing favors from the President of the United States. And that’s a serious problem. If those facts are proven, that sounds a lot like bribery.”

It looks for all the world like Donald Trump is at least accepting, and perhaps even demanding, payments from Corporate America in exchange for not interfering with their business. And — with astonishing frequency — it looks like Corporate America is too feckless and greedy to stand up to Trump.

Tell Congress:

Congress should open an investigation and hold hearings to determine if CBS, Skydance Media, and/or Donald Trump committed any illegal acts related to the combined $36 million the two companies have reportedly committed to Trump as they seek to go forward with their corporate merger.

Click to add your name now.

Thanks for taking action.

For justice,

- Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen

*That’s according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires list. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: If there are so many billionaires whose fortunes are increasing so rapidly that there’s a “need” to track their wealth in real time, our priorities as a society may be out of whack.
 
 
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