Host Stephen Colbert broke the news at a taping earlier on Thursday evening, triggering a chorus of boos from the live studio audience.
“I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners,” Colbert said, adding: “And of course, I’m grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us every night in here, out there, all around the world.”
Colbert had been informed of the decision on Wednesday night, he told the audience during his Thursday monologue.
“Yeah, I share your feeling,” he said, as the crowd in the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York shouted “no” and booed.
“It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” he continued. “It is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it.”
The Late Show was created by CBS, the BBC’s US news partner, in 1993 as a competitor to NBC. It came after a dispute between hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno over who should succeed Johnny Carson on the wildly-popular NBC’s Tonight Show.
Colbert took over the CBS programme from Letterman in 2015, and has become one of Trump’s staunchest critics on late night TV.
Before taking over the job at The Late Show, Colbert had been the host of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central – a programme which skewered American conservative politics and culture.
The announcement of the ending of the programme came amid talks between Paramount and Skydance Media to merge the two companies, a move that would require approval from the US federal government.
Democratic Senator Adam Schiff posted on X on Thursday that he had finished taping an interview with Colbert just before the cancellation was announced.
He questioned whether the announcement was tied to the $16m (£12m) settlement the network agreed to pay to Trump, writing: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserved to know”.
The settlement came after Trump sued CBS last October alleging the network had deceptively edited an interview that aired on its 60 Minutes news programme with his presidential election rival Kamala Harris, to “tip the scales in favour of the Democratic party”.
Paramount said it would pay to settle the suit, but with the money allocated to Trump’s future presidential library, not paid to him “directly or indirectly”.
