FCC’s Brendan Carr Focuses on Celebrity Interviews Over Foreign Ownership of Paramount

The FCC has decided to relax its rules on foreign equity ownership, allowing three sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi to acquire a 49.5 percent stake in the Paramount-Warner Bros. entity, despite the usual 25 percent limit.

Under Brendan Carr’s leadership, the FCC has taken a hard stance against domestic media, threatening ABC, attempting to block interviews with Democrats, censoring late-night hosts, and pressuring journalists. Yet, it appears unconcerned about allowing oppressive foreign governments to hold a significant share in a major American media company.

In its ruling, the FCC justified the decision by stating that the stocks being acquired lack voting rights, meaning they “will not be able to wield any influence, let alone control, over decisions involving the Licensees.” However, this reasoning has been met with skepticism. Advocacy group Free Press and several Democrats have expressed their disapproval, arguing that “control over for-profit, commercial domestic news media by any government is an extraordinary situation that would surely strike most Americans as unseemly, precisely because of the utility of the news media as a propaganda tool for those governments.”

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner, voiced her concerns on social media, stating, “The FCC just let some of the most repressive governments in the world indirectly control nearly all of a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. An investment this large in one of America’s biggest media companies doesn’t just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and made.”