Judd Apatow says the Skydance merger has murdered satire

Indeed, under Ellison’s tenure, the Skydance-controlled CBS abruptly cancelled The Late Show, hosted by vocal Trump mocker Stephen Colbert, and installed right-wing pseudo-journalist Bari Weiss to essentially refashion CBS News into another Fox propaganda mill. ABC followed by bowing to White House pressure and suspending Colbert’s late-night colleague Jimmy Kimmel for telling jokes Trump’s camp didn’t like. As Apatow says, all of this top-down censorship of comedic voices is just the beginning. 

“I think we live in a world where everybody, you know, bends the knee to Trump,” Apatow told Wilstein, “and we see all these corporations and media corporations and they’re clearly making all sorts of judgements—and often unethical judgements—to not get in trouble and to keep the paycheck. That kind of consolidation, it does lead to less risk-taking. We do seem to have a world where everyone is trying to not make a huge mistake.”

For Apatow, comedy is both a business and a course of study, as his recent filmography includes documentaries praising the sort of risk-taking comics (Norm MacDonald, Maria Bamford, Mel Brooks, Garry Shandling, George Carlin) whose uniquely bold voices he says are imperiled by people like Ellison holding the keys. 

Expanding his evaluation of the current media landscape, Apatow concludes that the current situation would “require executives and people in business to say freedom of speech is important, and human rights are important, and treating people well is important, and feeding people is important.” Apatow continued, “We all get asked about it, but it’s really the executives that are in the position. They get to decide what the approach to telling the news is at CNN. I don’t get to decide. So we’ll see.”