Paramount Global Headquarters in New York, USA on Tuesday, August 27th, 2024.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Federal Communications Commission cleared the $8 billion merger method on Thursday Paramount and Skydance Media.
Announced more than a year ago, the deal includes CBS Broadcast TV Network, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Channel.
“Americans no longer trust legacy national news media to report completely, accurately and fairly,” FCC chairman Brendan Kerr wrote in a statement Thursday. “Now is the time for changes, so we welcome Skydance’s commitment to making major changes on the once-famous CBS broadcast network.”
Carr said Skydance made a written commitment to ensure that the programming of the new company has a diverse perspective 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 assess bias complaints.
The FCC chair noted that Skydance does not have a DEI program in place and agreed not to establish such an initiative with the new company.
Paramount Chairman Shari Redstone is set to leave the company’s board of directors once the Skydance merger is complete. Her family’s company, National Amusements, sells control of Paramount to Skydance.
Skydance is owned by David Ellison, Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison.
The FCC’s decision to greenlight the merger was not unanimous. Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the three-member committee, opposed the move, saying she was suffering from Paramount’s recent payments to settle the lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump for CBS’s “60 minutes.”
“The most important payments and this reckless approval encouraged those who believe that the government can extract financial and ideological concessions, demand positive treatment and ensure positive media coverage,” she wrote in a opposing statement.
The FCC ruling comes less than a month after Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million after he sued the company over compiling a “60-minute” interview with former vice president Kamala Harris. It also happened a week after CBS announced it was cancelling “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
In one of his monologues last week, Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe” and referenced the disputed merger between Paramount and Skydance Media.
At the time, Paramount and CBS executives issued a statement saying that the cancellation was a “pure financial decision against a challenging late-night background.”
However, the timing of that decision has been questioned by many politicians and a group of Hollywood merchants.
The writer’s guild has asked New York State Attorney Letitia James to join California and begin an investigation into potential misconduct in Paramount.
“Cancellations are part of business, but businesses that end the show with malice due to explicit or implicit political pressure in a democratic society are dangerous and unacceptable,” the WGA wrote in a statement last week. “Paramount’s decision is against the backdrop of President Trump’s relentless attacks on the free media outlets through lawsuits against CBS and ABC, threatening lawsuits from media organisations with serious coverage and threatening merciless refunds from PBS and NPR.”
California’s democratic Senator Adam Schiff and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren also questioned the deal.
“Was it a coincidence that CBS cancelled Colbert? Warren wrote in Op-Ed for Variety, released Wednesday. “Are you sure this isn’t part of a wink wink deal between the president and the giant corporation that needed something from his administration?”
