FCC Officials Took Gifts From Paramount During Merger Review
ProPublica reports that senior FCC officials accepted lavish gifts, including a private Kennedy Center gala hosted by Paramount, while the company awaited FCC approval for a billion-dollar merger, raising direct conflicts of interest and public trust concerns.
This ProPublica investigation reveals that multiple current and former FCC officials accepted pricey gifts—including fundraising support and private events at the Kennedy Center—from Paramount (then CBS/ViacomCBS) between 2019 and 2024, overlapping precisely with the period when Paramount needed FCC approval for multibillion-dollar mergers and license renewals.
The gifts were not condemned or recused—they were accepted under the agency's own ethics waiver for the Kennedy Center gala, a loophole that allows corporate-funded events to be treated as permissible 'widely attended gatherings.' The same officials then participated in decisions worth billions to the company. This is not a minor ethics lapse; it is a structural failure in the agency charged with protecting the public interest in telecommunications and media.
It directly connects to a broader pattern: under both the Biden and Trump administrations, the FCC has weakened media ownership rules, fast-tracked consolidation, and treated billion-dollar mergers as routine, with minimal scrutiny of harms to local news, diversity, or competition. The gift-acceptance culture at the agency is a key enabler of that deregulatory bias. The result is that the public interest—cheaper, more local, and more diverse media—loses out to corporate interests every time.
The humanitarian alternative
Congress should immediately close the Kennedy Center waiver loophole and ban FCC commissioners and senior staff from accepting any gifts, meals, or event access from entities with pending matters before the agency—including their parent companies and subsidiaries. The FCC should also require publicly searchable, real-time disclosure of all waivers granted and all gifts accepted by any employee, with penalties for violations including recusal from any matter involving the donor company. A binding rotating recusal rule would ensure that any official who received a gift from a merger applicant within the prior two years cannot vote on that merger.
Falsifiable predictions
What this entry claims will happen, and what data would prove it wrong. The Reckoner revisits these against current reality.
- An ethics investigation into FCC gift practices will be opened by the Office of Government Ethics or an inspector general within 90 days.
- At least one FCC commissioner who accepted such gifts will recuse themselves from future Paramount merger proceedings within 60 days.
Original source — excerpted
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