The Paramount Global headquarters in New York, US, on Tuesday, Aug. 27, 2024.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Federal Communications Commission cleared the way Thursday for an $8 billion merger between Paramount and Skydance Media.
The deal, which was announced more than a year ago, includes the CBS broadcast television network, Paramount Pictures and the Nickelodeon channel.
“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.”
Carr said Skydance had made written commitments to ensure the new company’s programing would have a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum. Skydance also said it would hire a third-party impartial outsider to report to the president of the new company to evaluate complaints of bias.
The FCC chairman noted that Skydance does not have any DEI programs in place and has agreed not to establish any such initiatives at the new company.
Paramount chair Shari Redstone is set to depart the company’s board once the Skydance merger is complete. Her family’s company National Amusements is selling its controlling stake in Paramount to Skydance.
Skydance is owned by David Ellison, the soun of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison.
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 FCC’s ruling comes less than a month after Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to Trump after he sued the company over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. It also occurred a week after CBS announced it was canceling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Colbert had called the settlement a “big fat bribe” during one of his monologues last week, referencing the $8.4 billion pending merger between Paramount and Skydance Media, which required the approval of the Trump administration to proceed.
At the time, Paramount and CBS executives released a statement saying the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against the challenging backdrop in late night.”
However, the timing of its decision has been called into question by a number of political figures and Hollywood trade groups.
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?”
