Paramount’s headquarters in New York, United States, Tuesday, August 27, 2024.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty images
The Federal Communications Commission paved the way on Thursday for a merger of $ 8 billion between Primordial and Skydance Media.
The agreement, which was announced more than a year ago, includes the CBS Broadcast Television Network, Paramount Pictures and the Nickelodeon channel.
“The Americans no longer trust the national media inherited to report completely, with precision and fairly,” Brendan Carr, president of the FCC, in a statement on Thursday. “It’s time to change. This is why I salute Skydance’s commitment to make significant changes to the CBS diffusion network formerly corrected.”
Carr said Skydance had made written commitments to guarantee that the programming of the new company would have a diversity of points of view through the political and ideological spectrum. Skydance also said that he would hire a third -party impartial foreigner to report to the president of the new company to assess the bias complaints.
The President of the FCC noted that Skydance has no programs in place and has agreed not to establish such initiatives in the new company.
Paramount Flesh Shari Redstone should leave the company’s board of directors once the fusion of Skydance has been completed. The company of his national family amusements sells his control participation in Paramount to Skydance.
Skydance belongs to David Ellison, the soun of the founder of Oracle and billionaire Larry Ellison.
The decision of the Greenlight FCC the Merger was not unanimous. Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat in the Three Persons Commission, opposed this decision, saying that she was troubled by the recent payment of Paramount to settle a prosecution brought by President Donald Trump against the “60 minutes” of CBS.
“Primordial payment and this imprudent approval have embraced those who believe that the government can-and should be the power to extract financial and ideological concessions, from the demand for favored treatment and to guarantee positive media coverage,” she wrote in a dissent statement.
The FCC’s decision comes less than a month after Paramount agreed to pay $ 16 million in Trump after continuing the company for the modification of a “60-minute” interview with former vice-president Kamala Harris. This also occurred a week after CBS announced that it cancels “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”.
Colbert had described the colony of “big-briefs” during one of his monologues last week, referring to the melting in the process of 8.4 billion dollars between Paramount and Skydance Media, which forced the approval of the Trump administration.
At the time, the leaders of Paramount and CBS published a statement saying that cancellation was “purely a financial decision against the difficult context at the end of the evening”.
However, the time of his decision was questioned by a number of Hollywood political figures and commercial groups.
The writer’s Guild of America asked New York State lawyer Letitia James to join California and launch an investigation into potential reprehensible acts in Paramount.
“Cancellations are part of the company, but a company ending a spectacle of bad faith due to explicit or implicit political pressure is dangerous and unacceptable in a democratic society,” WGA wrote in a statement last week. “Paramount’s decision comes in a context of incessant attacks against a free press by President Trump, thanks to prosecution against CBS and ABC, threatened the dispute of media organizations with critical coverage and unreasonable funding of PBS and NPR.”
Democratic senators Adam Schiff, from California, and Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, also questioned the agreement.
“Is it a coincidence that CBS canceled Colbert only three days after talking?” Warren wrote in an editorial for Variety published on Wednesday. “Are we sure that it was not part of a clinical agreement between the president and a giant company who needed something of his administration?”