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

ProPublica reports that FCC officials, including Chair Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty, accepted expensive gifts—including Kennedy Center gala tickets worth over $12,000 for Trusty and potentially $125,000 skybox seats for Carr—from Paramount while the company required FCC approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance Media and faces review of a proposed $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The reporting is substantive and well-sourced, featuring named ethics experts (Walter Shaub, former Office of Government Ethics director; Virginia Canter, former White House ethics lawyer; Kedric Payne of the Campaign Legal Center) who explicitly characterize the gifts as conflicts of interest, alongside detailed disclosure analysis showing Carr has accepted over $63,000 in CBS/Paramount tickets since 2017. ProPublica documents a 10-year pattern of FCC commissioners accepting $308,000 in media-company-sponsored gifts, provides specific timelines linking gift-giving to regulatory decisions, and includes the FCC's defense (that the practice has been long-standing and ethics-cleared) alongside experts' rebuttals. Independent coverage from CNN confirms the lawsuit filed by 12 states to block the merger, and Yahoo News reports similar findings about the gift pattern, corroborating ProPublica's core claims. Critical readers should monitor whether the Justice Department investigates potential federal ethics violations, whether Carr and Trusty recuse themselves from the pending Warner Bros. merger decision (which could paralyze FCC action), and the outcome of state antitrust litigation.