Carr Defends Skydance/Paramount Conditions in PBS Interview
Skydance’s agreement to appoint an anti-bias ombudsman in order to secure merger approval isn’t a violation of press freedoms, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in an interview Thursday with PBS NewsHour. He noted that the bias monitor will report directly to CBS, not the FCC. “It's going to be for the broadcaster in the first instance to deal with it. If there's a complaint around news distortion ... then we would look at that complaint as it comes in,” he said. “It's not direct regulation by the FCC in terms of regulation of the newsroom itself. It's the company saying we want to put forth an ombudsman to help us do our job.”
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Asked how the company’s concessions could be voluntary while the FCC was holding up its merger approval, Carr said he was following precedent set by earlier administrations to require diversity initiatives. “Here, we're doing the same type of thing, but moving in the opposite direction.” NewsHour anchor Geoff Bennett asked Carr what had changed from 2018, when he was a commissioner and then-Chairman Ajit Pai said that under the First Amendment, the FCC didn’t have the power to revoke the license of a station over the content of a particular newscast. “Well, that was a statement by Chairman Pai, not a statement by me,” Carr said. “That statement was very narrow. If you read it, it was the content of a particular broadcast.”
The FCC’s still-open news distortion proceeding against CBS concerns the content of the network’s broadcast of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last October. “If we are seeing broadcasters that are engaged in patterns and practices that ultimately are inconsistent with their public interest obligation, then Congress has directed the FCC to take action in those contexts,” Carr said. “I don't think it's benefited the American people to have the FCC step back from enforcing the public interest mandate.”