Over the past year and a half, the FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, has given significant oversight to Paramount Skydance Corp.
The FCC signed off on Skydance’s deal to acquire Paramount Global, agreeing to transfer its streaming licenses (just days later, funnily enough, after CBS announced it had canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). The Commission is currently reviewing an application that would allow Middle Eastern investors to own a majority economic stake in Paramount Skydance (although control of the company would remain with David Ellison).
Along the way, of course, Paramount and its CBS affiliate had other matters before the FCC as well. However, a ProPublica report released Wednesday reveals that both Carr and fellow Republican FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty received expensive gifts worth thousands of dollars from Paramount: tickets to the Kennedy Center tribute, which the network televised.
ProPublica found that Trusty’s ethics disclosure revealed that tickets to the event were worth $12,000. Carr has not yet filed his ethics disclosure, but he was seen sitting in a private box with David Ellison, and Kennedy Center guidelines indicate the price of these tickets will be $125,000 each.
The timing of the event coincided with Paramount’s fight with Netflix for control of Warner Bros. Entertainment. Discovery. Paramount ultimately succeeded, and is now in the midst of an FCC review.
All that said, ProPublica found that attending the tribute ceremony at the Kennedy Center was a bipartisan tradition, with CBS offering tickets to FCC commissioners with corporate compliments. The nonprofit found that seven of the 10 commissioners who served in the past 10 years attended, including Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, and Ana Gomez, the only Democratic commissioner, who did not attend in 2025. But she has done so in the past.
But Paramount’s deal to buy WBD is attracting new scrutiny (not to mention lawsuits), which appears to put the gifted tickets in a new light.
