FCC Approves $8B Paramount-Skydance Merger

“Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly,” Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, wrote in a statement Thursday. “It is time for a change. That is why I welcome Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes at the once storied CBS broadcast network.”

The decision by the FCC to greenlight the merger was not unanimous. Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the three-person commission, opposed the move, saying she was troubled by Paramount’s recent payment to settle a suit brought by President Donald Trump against CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

“The Paramount payout and this reckless approval have emboldened those who believe the government can — and should-abuse its power to extract financial and ideological concessions, demand favored treatment, and secure positive media coverage,” she wrote in a dissent statement.

The Writer’s Guild of America asked New York State Attorney Letitia James to join California and launch an investigation into potential wrongdoing at Paramount.

“Cancelations are part of the business, but a corporation terminating a show in bad faith due to explicit or implicit political pressure is dangerous and unacceptable in a democratic society,” the WGA wrote in a statement last week. “Paramount’s decision comes against a backdrop of relentless attacks on a free press by President Trump, through lawsuits against CBS and ABC, threatened litigation of media organizations with critical coverage, and the unconscionable defunding of PBS and NPR.”

Democratic Senators Adam Schiff, of California, and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, also questioned the deal.

“Was it a coincidence that CBS canceled Colbert just three days after he spoke out?” Warren wrote in an op-ed for Variety published Wednesday. “Are we sure that this wasn’t part of a wink-wink deal between the president and a giant corporation that needed something from his administration?”