All of the late night comedians addressed ABC suspending Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday shows, but CBS’s Stephen Colbert’s reaction on The Late Show was especially bad. Not only did Colbert not see any problem in what Kimmel said, but he also teamed up with CNN host Jake Tapper and The New Yorker editor David Remnick to warn about the decay of press freedom in the Trump era.
...
Finally, Colbert would ask Remnick, who in his previous life wrote a Pulitzer-winning book about the fall of the Soviet Union and was the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, “When Putin took power, he consolidated his power around '99 and right after that started rolling up, like, media. How would you compare what's happening now to what Putin did? There were three big networks in Russia.”
Remnick thought the comparison was appropriate, “There was real journalism on television and in newspapers and radio. It was exciting, it was productive, the world was full of debate. Putin came to power on New Year's night, 1999-2000. And, you know who he went after first? This will sound a little familiar to you: comedians.”
[See NewsBusters for more]
