The Federal Communications Commission has waived its foreign-equity cap in the Paramount-Warner Bros. case and said three sovereign wealth funds run by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi can own 49.5 percent of the company.
That is a sharp break from the existing rule limiting foreign ownership of media companies that broadcast on public airwaves to 25 percent. Paramount owns 28 TV stations, which is why the restriction mattered here in the first place.
The FCC said the investors ‘will not be able to wield any influence, let alone control, over decisions involving the Licensees’ because the stock being purchased does not carry voting rights. That is the commission’s argument, anyway.
Critics are not buying it. Free Press, speaking to Variety, said control over for-profit, commercial domestic news media by any government is ‘an extraordinary situation’ that would strike most Americans as unseemly because of the propaganda value of the news media. Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, wrote on X that the agency had ‘let some of the most repressive governments in the world indirectly control nearly all of a combined Paramount-Warner Bros.’
The approval also sits uneasily next to the FCC’s recent behavior under Brendan Carr. During his tenure, the agency has repeatedly threatened ABC, tried to block stations from airing interviews with Democrats, censored late-night TV hosts, and tried to bully journalists. Now it is making room for foreign state money in a giant American media company while insisting that money somehow comes with no influence.
There is also more merger drama ahead. The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal is still pending an antitrust suit filed by California and 11 other states, with trial set for next March.
Here’s the thing: the FCC is treating ownership like a technicality and influence like a vibe. If the commission thinks nearly half of a major U.S. media company can be owned by foreign sovereign funds without raising real control concerns, it is asking taxpayers and viewers to accept a very convenient definition of power.
And if Brendan Carr’s FCC wants to be taken seriously as a guardian of the public interest, it cannot spend so much energy policing speech it dislikes at home while waving through a structure that hands enormous leverage to foreign governments abroad. That is not consistency. It is bureaucratic selective enforcement with a stock certificate attached.
