The last wall: Why Jon Stewart is untouchable at MAGA-coded Paramount

Jon Stewart complained that some people 'never shut up' about cancel culture — and Fox News proved him right: reporter; Jon Stewart in 2016, Wikimedia Commons

President Donald Trump has long made it clear that he wants Paramount to purchase Warner Brothers because its CEO, David Ellision has indicated that he will make CNN more sympathetic to Trump’s MAGA movement. Yet apparently one anti-Trump fixture of Paramount is so popular, Ellison isn’t going to touch him.

“LateNighter reports that Paramount wants to keep Stewart on board, as his presence has renewed interest in the program both on television and online,” reported The Daily Beast’s Vic Verbalaitis on Monday. “Company executives consider South Park and The Daily Show two Comedy Central assets that keep the cable channel relevant in the age of streaming, Semafor reports.”

Verbalaitis added, “The lack of confirmation on whether Stewart will extend his contract at this point in the year is nothing new. The outlet emphasized that the late-night host’s last two contract extensions weren’t announced until even later in the year: early November 2025 and late October 2024.”

Stewart, for his part, has made it clear that he will continue criticizing Trump even if doing so means Ellison eventually fires him.

“You don’t compromise on what you do, and you do it until they tell you to leave,” Stewart told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in 2025 shortly before extending his Paramount contract.

He added, “They’ve already done things that I’m upset about. If I had integrity, maybe I would stand up and go, ‘I’m out.’ Or maybe the integrity thing to do would be to stay in it and keep fighting in the foxhole.”

As The Atlantic’s David A. Graham reported earlier in August, Ellison is leveraging the friendship between Trump and his father, Oracle CEO David Ellison, to create a media empire.

“David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump’s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate,” Graham said. “First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss’s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn’t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.”

He continued, “Ellison has already moved on to an attempted merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials deep political changes at CNN if the deal was approved by federal regulators. Ellison got approval, but now that deal is in trouble anyway. Facing an antitrust lawsuit led by the attorney general of California, Paramount agreed to pause the merger until a trial next year. Experts are divided on how likely Paramount is to prevail, but if the merger doesn’t close by September 30, the company will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million every day until it does. In a New York Times column last week, Ellison complained that people are drawing incorrect inferences about his politics, but his private views are beside the point: What is public is Ellison’s willingness to play to the Trump administration’s politics to build an empire.”

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