CBS Mornings was too mad about Colbert's Bari Weiss joke to cover his finale

Now, as The Wrap reports, it’s not like covering Colbert’s last show was mandatory, or anything—ABC’s morning news show didn’t bother with it, either. But they presumably weren’t operating under an order (reported by Puck‘s Matthew Belloni) to outright ignore a major TV event on their own network, which was reportedly handed down by CBS News president Tom Cibrowski after Colbert ran a segment making fun of CBS Evening News‘ difficulties in getting to China to cover a presidential summit. (Colbert mocked the screw-up by running a video of a guy with a pumpkin stuck on his head titled “Where In The World Is Tony Dokoupil?”)

Cibrowski reportedly thought the bit was “unprofessional and unprovoked,” and thought Colbert had “kicked colleagues when they were down,” despite CBS News members showing support to the host over the year leading up to his cancellation. And so an order apparently went down from on-high to ignore Colbert’s star-studded finale, which included a number of very famous guests (most notably Paul McCartney) paying tribute to the departing host. Meanwhile, Cibrowski’s actual impact has been to make a lot more people spread around the bit of Colbert making fun of Dokoupil (as well as Bari Weiss, depicted in the video as a woman trying to smash the pumpkin with a hammer), so, good job drawing attention from the foul-up, Tom. Meanwhile, we can only imagine nobody working in Michigan public access TV has to worry about stuff like this.