FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount as the Company Needed Approval for Billion-Dollar Deals

Hi r/entertainment,

We thought folks here may be interested in our latest: Months after FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, she and a guest accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from the company worth more than $12,000, according to records we obtained.

Another commissioner who approved the merger, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, sat in a private skybox with his wife, as well as Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year. However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade.

Ethics experts told us this poses a blatant conflict of interest. By accepting the gifts, the FCC commissioners are compromising the agency’s impartiality and should avoid acting on Paramount’s pending merger, they said.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

**Read our full investigation:** [https://www.propublica.org/article/paramount-mergers-fcc-kennedy-center-gala](https://www.propublica.org/article/paramount-mergers-fcc-kennedy-center-gala)

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to our requests for comment.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law. “FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the statement said. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Regarding Carr’s latest ethics report, the FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.

I think they misspelled the word “bribes”.

Who else but republicans, damn. Like I’d pretend to be surprised by blatant bribes. But lying isn’t all that fun