Independent journalist Don Lemon hammered his former CNN boss in a blistering essay on the ouster of Stephen Colbert that is widely seen as a capitulation to President Donald Trump.

On Thursday night’s edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host will sign off for the last time as the cancellation that was announced last year finally arrives. Trump himself has taken credit for Colbert’s cancellation, along with a raft of other media moves.

Lemon — who has also been attacked by the president and arrested by his federal forces — marked Colbert’s exit with an impassioned Substack essay entitled, “Don’t Cry For Stephen Colbert. Cry For The First Amendment.”

In several passages, Lemon compared his own situation with Colbert’s, calling his own firing a harbinger of what was coming for the Late Show host:

The networks didn’t like me asking conservatives hard questions. CNN didn’t like the mirror I was holding up every night. So they pushed me out. And I thought: if it happened to me it will happen to others. It will trickle down. Or up. Depending on how you look at it.

Now it has trickled all the way to late night television.

CBS says The Late Show was cancelled because it was losing $40 to $50 million a year. That may be true. The traditional late night model is genuinely under financial pressure. The way people consume media has changed. I have lived that change. I built my entire second act on it, right here on this platform and on YouTube and Twitch and everywhere the audience actually is.

But here is what is also true. The cancellation was announced two days after Colbert publicly criticized Trump’s settlement with Paramount, CBS’s parent company, over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Colbert called himself, on air, “a martyr of free speech.” He was not performing. He believed it. And I believe him.

Lemon also identified another common thread with Colbert, torching former Late Show and CNN boss Chris Licht without naming him:

The world that produced The Late Show, the world of legacy media, cable news, and network television, has long had a problem nobody wanted to name out loud. It is a world that has been extraordinarily good to a very specific kind of person. White men who fail spectacularly and are promoted for it. White men who make catastrophic decisions and are handed bigger offices for it. White men who are visibly, demonstrably unqualified and are given more power anyway. I have watched it for thirty years. I have been managed by it. I have been undone by it.

The executive producer who ran The Late Show for years eventually left. And somehow landed in my world. That same person, from that same television orbit, eventually became my boss at CNN. And fired me. I won’t name him. I don’t need to. But I will say this: it was one of the most spectacular examples of a white man failing up that I have witnessed in this industry. Profoundly unqualified. Visibly incompetent. Elevated anyway. Because that is how that world protects certain people and discards others. And the people it discards are almost always the ones making the powerful uncomfortable.

Read Lemon’s full commentary here.

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