Sen. Adam Schiff raised questions of President Donald Trump’s potential political influence in the $8 billion Paramount-Skydance merger in an open letter to FCC chair Brendan Carr on Monday.
“The sequence of actions and statements leading up to and following the FCC’s merger approval, including Paramount’s $16 million settlement with President Trump just days before the FCC issued its approval, raises significant questions and alarm that the FCC – an independent regulatory agency – has become a vehicle for President Trump to exact personal retribution and undermine the freedom of the press,” Sen. Schiff wrote.
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The California senator called on the FCC to answer to a series of concerns, including several related to the $16 million settlement paid by Paramount to President Trump weeks before the merger’s approval.
The letter also demanded that the FCC make transparent details about the editorial decisions and content oversight that took place at Paramount’s network CBS, specifically citing the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and repeated hits at “60 Minutes.”
Schiff appeared on Colbert’s show the night his cancellation was made public and made his own video response to the cancellation, saying he was one of the first to know. The senator brought forward concerns that the cancellation, settlement and merger all glean towards more self-censorship and political sway in free speech.
CBS had said that they dropped the late night show for financial reasons, but Schiff and other Democratic senators raised the prospect that anti-bribery laws may have been broken.
“The FCC’s recent actions are especially troubling considering President Trump’s history of disparaging the press and undermining the protections afforded to them by the Constitution,” the letter continued. “In an early display of your willingness to abuse the FCC’s authority according to President Trump’s whims, you inappropriately reinstated complaints against networks regularly scrutinized by President Trump while leaving untouched the dismissal of a similar complaint involving Fox News.
Schiff gave the commission eight questions to respond to asking about meetings with new Skydance head David Ellison, the FCC’s involvement in programming content decisions and conditions of the merger.
The senator requested a response from the FCC by Aug. 25.
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