FCC Chair Says CBS-Trump Settlement Talks Have Nothing to Do With Paramount-Skydance Deal Review

FCC chairman Brendan Carr sidestepped a question during a Monday press conference about how a potential settlement of President Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over its “60 Minutes” Kamala Harris interview could impact agency’s review of the Paramount-Skydance deal.

“The settlement and any discussions around that have nothing to do with the work that we’re doing at the FCC,” Carr said. “There’s at least three different things are going on: There’s the litigation, which we’re not a part of and there’s been no discussions about, there is the transaction that’s before us and there is the CBS news distortion [complaint]. And we’re taking those last two, running our normal course.”

“On the [Paramount-Skydance] transaction itself, we are getting close to the informal 180 day clock. I think we’re somewhere in the 160s but we’re just running our normal process across a lot of different transactions right now,” he added. “We’re just going to apply the law and the facts and the record and move forward. We are simply focused on the record that’s before us, and we’re going to make our decision based on the agency’s record itself.”

Despite Carr’s claim that the FCC’s work is unrelated to the lawsuit, the agency made the transcript and camera footage of the interview public as part of a “news distortion” investigation.

He previously said that a “news distortion” complaint from conservative law firm The Center for American Rights over the interview would likely arise in the agency’s review of the Skydance transaction. The final deadline for the public comment period ended on March 24.

“Personally, I have not reviewed those comments at this point, but at some point we will get to it in terms of reviewing the comments and making a final decision,” Carr said.

When asked about Trump’s public comments calling for the maximum fines and punishment for CBS, Carr said that no decisions have been made but that “all options remain on the table” and the investigation remains ongoing. He did not rule out the possibility for broadcast license revocations as a result of public interest standard violations.

“License revocations is a tool that the FCC has in its toolkit. It’s long been viewed as sort of the regulatory death penalty. So it’s a pretty high bar to meet to go down that path,” he said. “But it is one of the the options the FCC has, and we continue to take a vigorous look at the public interest standard and making sure that the FCC enforces it. We’ve opened lots of investigations so far. We’re going to see where they go.”

In addition to its scrutiny of Paramount, the FCC has launched investigations into Comcast and Disney over their diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

“There’s some concerning things that we’ve seen there about potential discrimination that we are continuing to run down inside the building, and we’ll see where that investigation on Disney and ABC goes,” Carr added. “But there’s some concerning elements there about potentially making race-based and gender-based discriminatory decisions. We have to let that play out in terms of the process, but that’s one where I’m particularly interested to see where it goes.”

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