Two Federal Communications Commission Republicans who can shape Paramount’s next merger fight attended the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2025 with access supplied by, or closely tied to, the company whose business sits before their agency, according to ProPublica.
FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty received tickets for herself and a guest from Paramount worth more than $12,000, ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica show. Five months earlier, Trusty had cast a decisive vote to approve Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives, Bloomberg reported. Kennedy Center guidelines listed those seats at $125,000 each. Carr’s financial disclosure for the year has not been made public, so ProPublica said it could not determine whether Paramount gave him the seats.
The timing is the problem. Paramount was beginning a hostile push for Warner Bros. Discovery around the same gala. That effort later produced a merger agreement that needs FCC approval. The proposed $110 billion consolidation would put Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. under one corporate roof, joining Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN and other major media assets.
Ethics rules meet Hollywood hospitality
Federal gift rules bar employees from accepting gifts from companies regulated by their agency, doing business with it or seeking official action from it. There are exceptions, including for some widely attended events, but those require an agency interest that outweighs the risk that the official may appear improperly influenced.
Four ethics experts told ProPublica that Carr and Trusty should stay out of decisions on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal. Walter Shaub, who led the Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, said a top regulator should not accept a gift from a regulated company whose interests the regulator can affect. Virginia Canter, a former ethics lawyer in multiple administrations, told ProPublica the commissioners’ participation would damage the integrity of the process.
The FCC said in a statement that ethics officers had cleared commissioners’ attendance for years and that chairs and officials attended the event in the same way across the Trump, Biden and Obama administrations. An FCC official familiar with internal guidance told ProPublica the agency treated the gala as falling under the widely attended gathering exception. The FCC did not provide the written authorizations ProPublica requested.
Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, described the invitations as a decades-long CBS practice involving government officials from both parties, according to ProPublica. She did not address whether the gifts created a conflict.
A small commission, a large deal
The FCC has three commissioners rather than its usual five: Carr, Trusty and Democrat Anna Gomez. A full commission vote requires a three-member quorum, so a recusal could make the agency’s path harder. Carr also could delegate approval to staff, as he did in Nexstar Media Group’s acquisition of Tegna, ProPublica reported.
Gomez did not attend the December 2025 gala, but ProPublica reported she accepted Paramount tickets in 2023 and 2024. Gomez said she followed agency advice for those appearances and said she declined Paramount’s 2025 invitation because of concerns about press independence tied to conditions Paramount accepted in its earlier FCC merger approval.
ProPublica’s review found that seven of the 10 FCC commissioners who served since 2016 accepted Kennedy Center tickets from CBS or its parent company worth more than $260,000. Carr’s prior disclosures show at least seven ticket gifts since his 2017 appointment, totaling more than $63,000. Other media companies regulated by the FCC, including NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, also paid for commissioners to attend events, with total gifts from all sponsors topping $308,000.
Carr and Trusty did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney under George W. Bush, told ProPublica that a court could look skeptically at an FCC merger decision if the agency’s process appears corrupted by ethics violations.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.