FCC Officials Got Some Very Nice Gifts From Paramount After Key Votes

A new report reveals how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, and other FCC officials, were rewarded after votes helping out Paramount.

After Paramount Skydance secured its multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance Media, it gave Federal Communications Commission officials who approved the deal some very pricey gifts. 

ProPublica reports that the company gave away expensive tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala worth thousands of dollars. Commissioner Olivia Trusty, whose vote was needed to approve the merger, went to the black-tie event with a guest, thanks to tickets gifted by Paramount worth $12,000. FCC Chair Brendan Carr got even more expensive seats for himself and his wife: private skybox tickets with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other company executives worth $125,000 each. 

These weren’t the first gifts from Paramount to FCC commissioners. Ethics disclosures show that the company has gifted tickets to the gala to seven of the 10 commissioners over the last decade, a glaring conflict of interest for government employees responsible for regulating broadcasting companies like Paramount. Carr has accepted Kennedy Center tickets at least seven times since his appointment in 2017, totaling $63,000, according to his financial statements.  

Ethics experts told ProPublica that gifts like these compromise the impartiality of the FCC, and that commissioners who accepted them shouldn’t take part in any decisions concerning Paramount’s merger. 

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, told ProPublica. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

The FCC’s final seal of approval is one of the last barriers to Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros., which would put one company in charge of the networks CBS and CNN, the streaming services Paramount and HBO Max, and dozens of other media entities. Critics fear it could hand a powerful media conglomerate over to David and Larry Ellison, staunch supporters of President Trump who would likely force CNN to produce right-wing news coverage. 

Twelve Democratic-led states sued to stop the merger on Monday, and the Writers’ Guild, a union representing 18,000 media workers, also filed a lawsuit the next day against the deal in federal court, saying that it threatens the workers’ livelihoods. The British government signaled last month that it would investigate whether the new entity would hurt competition in the entertainment industry. 

Like many business deals in Trump’s second term, this one has a whiff of corruption. The FCC has been tainted, and Trump openly supports a deal that could stifle critical news coverage of him, while giving his supporters control of a large swath of the entertainment industry. His own FCC appears to be in Paramount’s pocket. 

Wild New Details Emerge on ICE Agent Involved in Fatal Maine Shooting

The agent shot Joan Sebastian Guerrero dead during a vehicle stop.

The ICE agent who shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian immigrant in Biddeford, Maine, Monday morning had been with the agency for just a few short months.

The agent who killed Joan Sebastián Guerrero, the father of a three-year-old daughter, has not yet been identified, but a senior administration official who spoke with The Atlantic Tuesday on the condition of anonymity said that the agent was hired this year. The agent had previously been employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs Police, and........

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