ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Over the last year, Paramount Skydance Media has been on a growth and spending spree. It started when Skydance bought Paramount, a much bigger company. And now the combined entity wants to buy an even bigger company - Warner Bros. Discovery - in a deal that's worth more than $110 billion.
Now, this merger is facing some major legal hurdles, including an antitrust lawsuit brought by a dozen states. And it would also need approval from the Federal Communications Commission. A decision on that could come as early as next week. But new reporting from ProPublica suggests that top federal regulators at the FCC have a conflict of interest, and that's because they've previously accepted gifts from Paramount worth tens of thousands of dollars. The report is based on documented government financial and ethics disclosures. Corey Johnson is the reporter who wrote the story for ProPublica, and I asked him to describe, what has reporting uncovered about the gifts received by FCC officials?
COREY JOHNSON: Our reporting kind of shows that all three of the commissioners have taken money from Paramount, CBS. But the way the story starts, it focuses your attention on December 7 of 2025, Honors Gala at the Kennedy Center, which is a swanky, very exclusive annual event that the Kennedy Center has been putting on for decades. In December, you know, Sylvester Stallone was there, and for the first time, a sitting president actually hosted the event.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Perhaps the greatest underdog in the history of cinema, Sylvester Stallone.
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JOHNSON: So Donald Trump hosted, and he was there. But also in the audience were two FCC commissioners, Olivia Trusty and Chairman Brendan Carr. And what we found, initially through Olivia Trusty's financial disclosure record, was that she had accepted over $12,000 in tickets as a gift from Paramount to attend. You know, under federal rules, there is, like, this bedrock principle or requirement that no federal official can receive anything of value from any entity that they regulate or is doing business with or is seeking to do business with the government. People - when they violate this, they get fired. Sometimes they even get criminally investigated.
And so then it turned out that five months after Trusty was the key deciding vote in approving the Paramount Skydance merger, she had received these gifts from Paramount Skydance. And then as we dug a little bit deeper, we found out that Chairman Brendan Carr was also in the room. It turns out that the seat - the price for one seat in that skybox is $125,000. And so presumably, if he disclosed that he and his wife took those as gifts, presumably, that's a $250,000 gift.
MA: And you say presumably because his financial disclosure hasn't been made public yet for this year.
JOHNSON: His financial disclosure has not been made public. So it's a mystery right now. Where is Chairman Carr's report, and why haven't the agency released them?
MA: So you found, kind of hiding in plain sight, what seems to be a violation of federal ethics rules, a conflict of interest because they're accepting gifts from a company that they're supposed to be regulating and deciding on. What have they said in response to this report? What has the FCC said?
JOHNSON: FCC has said, in essence, that there's really nothing to see here, that this is something that we have done, not just in this administration, but in previous administrations, and everything has been approved. But what we learned by looking at the law and then talking to four really credible ethics attorneys - and when we shared the documents and what was being said, almost all of these experts, they were outraged. They were shocked. They couldn't even imagine what the legal reasoning or justification could be for allowing one of the commissioners to attend and to accept these gifts.
MA: So you've revealed this potential conflict of interest with the commissioners who'll be deciding on this huge potential merger between two media giants. Can you talk about what's at stake?
JOHNSON: It's really the tale of two mergers, one that the FCC approved and one that the FCC is in the midst of approving. I should also point out, we're talking there's at least $110 billion deal that we're talking about here. And so if you're Paramount, in order to get $110 billion approved, spending 250,000 on a skybox seat is chump change.
You know, thus far, you know, the White House and President Trump has been very supportive publicly of the merger. But in terms of what would be best for the government, the experts did not waver or did not equivocate at all, they said that this - that nothing - what's at stake here, at least for the commission, is nothing less than the public's trust in government.
MA: We've been speaking with Corey Johnson, reporter with ProPublica, who covers conflicts of interest and corruption in the federal government. Corey Johnson, thanks for being here.
JOHNSON: Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROSS HAMMOND'S "EASY DOES IT BLUES (FEAT. CLIFFORD CHILDER, BENWAR SHEPARD AND DEVON EDMOND)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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