Brendan Carr’s FCC is more worried about who The View interviews than foreign governments owning Paramount

The FCC’s foreign-ownership rules exist for a reason: they are one of the few structural guardrails ensuring that American broadcasters cannot be quietly captured by foreign governments. Under Brendan Carr, those guardrails have just been turned into a rubber stamp. By waiving the 25 percent limit for the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, the FCC is allowing sovereign wealth funds owned by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi to control nearly half of a major US film and television company. That is not a minor technical adjustment; it inverts decades of policy intended to protect the public airwaves from state-backed influence. Yet Carr’s public energy has been aimed elsewhere. His FCC has spent considerable time and regulatory capital threatening ABC over *The View* and other programming, using the agency’s complaint mechanism as a way to pressure Disney on editorial choices and DEI policies. The message is consistent: independent-minded or progressive content is treated as an existential threat to broadcasting, while actual ownership by foreign governments is treated as a routine business decision. It is a striking inversion of priorities for an agency whose mandate is supposedly about protecting the public interest. Carr’s behavior fits a broader pattern—one in which legacy media consolidation is accelerated, journalistic independence is attacked, and foreign capital is welcomed as long as it greases the wheels of a politically convenient merger. The FCC’s statutory tools are being repurposed from consumer and national security safeguards into ideological weapons and deal-making incentives. The Paramount case demonstrates that the chairman’s concern isn’t “foreign influence” in the abstract. It’s influence he doesn’t control. The deal still faces other approvals and antitrust review, but the FCC’s waiver is a pivotal signal. If the agency can approve nearly half-ownership of Paramount by three foreign governments while simultaneously threatening ABC over who sits on a talk show couch, then the FCC’s priorities are no longer debatable—they are openly inverted. The question now is whether the rest of the regulatory apparatus will follow Carr’s lead and treat foreign sovereign ownership as a speed bump rather than a firewall. Source: https://www.theverge.com/policy/997416/brendan-carr-fcc-foreign-governments-paramount