Stephen Colbert ripped into his own network with just days until his show goes off the air.
Colbert made fun of Tony Dokoupil on Thursday night as the CBS Evenings News anchor faces increasingly dire ratings and setbacks. This week, Dokoupil missed his chance to properly cover President Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The 45-year-old, who is only five months into his controversial run anchoring the primetime CBS show, reportedly failed to secure his visa to cover the summit in Beijing. He was instead forced to cover the event from Taipei, over 1,000 miles south.
It’s not clear if Dokoupil’s failure to get a visa was due to a late application or some separate issue, Semafor reported, but it makes the CBS anchor the odd one out. Dokoupil’s competitors, NBC News’s Tom Llamas and ABC News’s David Muir, both covered the summit from Beijing with no apparent issue.
Dokoupil was hired to anchor CBS Evening News by the network’s controversial editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who has spoken about wanting to push CBS in a more Trump-friendly direction.
“All the news teams are on the ground in China to cover this epic and historic summit,” Colbert told viewers in his Thursday monologue. “All except one.”
Colbert explained Dokoupil’s visa issue and joked, “Well, that is disappointing, but it does fit in with their slogan. ‘CBS News: when events happen, we’re at most one country away.”
The joke comes as Colbert finishes his final stretch of episodes before The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ends for good.
“We only got five shows left,” Colbert noted at the start of his monologue. His final episode airs on May 21. The episode marks the end of not just Colbert’s run as a late-night host, but of The Late Show entirely.
Colbert announced his show’s cancellation in July 2025, mere days after he criticized his parent company, Paramount, for needlessly settling a flimsy lawsuit against CBS by President Trump. Colbert called the $16 million settlement to Trump a “big fat bribe.”
Although CBS’s decision to fire Colbert was reportedly made before that monologue and motivated by largely financial concerns, critics have accused the move as another example of the company caving to the Trump administration.
Since his cancelation was announced, Colbert has grown bolder in his criticisms against CBS.
In February Colbert called out CBS for pressuring him not to air his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. He also criticized the network for failing to push back against Trump.
“I am grateful to have worked for CBS for the last 11 years,” Colbert had said. “I’m just so surprised that this giant global corporation would not stand up to these bullies.”
