There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect
FCC commissioners face intense scrutiny after accepting high-value tickets from Paramount while the company sought critical regulatory approvals. Ethics experts argue these gifts compromise the commission's impartiality and demand recusal from future merger decisions.
The veneer of public service is peeling away, revealing a rot that smells distinctly of corporate influence and backroom deals. When the very people tasked with regulating the telecommunications giants of this country are found rubbing elbows in private skyboxes with the CEOs of those same companies, we have moved past the realm of coincidence and into the territory of institutional capture. The recent revelations regarding FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Commissioner Olivia Trusty are not just a lapse in judgment; they are a masterclass in how the powerful bypass the rules meant to keep them honest.
Consider the timeline: Commissioner Trusty cast a decisive vote to approve Paramount’s massive $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, and mere months later, she was enjoying a $12,000 gift of tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, courtesy of the very company she just empowered according to ProPublica via Ars Technica. Meanwhile, Chair Brendan Carr was spotted in a private skybox—a perch valued at $125,000 per seat—alongside Paramount CEO David Ellison. While we wait for Carr’s financial disclosures to confirm the source of his tickets, his history of accepting over $63,000 in gifts from CBS and Paramount since 2017 paints a picture of a regulator who has become far too comfortable with the entities he is sworn to oversee.
Defenders of this behavior might argue that these galas are merely social events, or that the commissioners are simply participating in the cultural life of the capital. They might suggest that a few tickets do not sway the outcome of multi-billion dollar regulatory decisions. This is a naive, if not intentionally deceptive, defense. Federal ethics rules are explicitly designed to prevent even the appearance of impropriety, precisely because the influence of such gifts is often subtle, psychological, and corrosive. When a company is actively seeking approval for a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, the optics of regulators accepting lavish hospitality from that same company are not just bad—they are disqualifying.
As Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, aptly noted, there is no place for this kind of proximity between a regulator and a regulated entity as reported by Ars Technica. If the FCC wants to maintain even a shred of public trust, Carr and Trusty must recuse themselves from any upcoming decisions regarding Paramount. Anything less is an admission that the commission is no longer a watchdog, but a lapdog waiting for its next treat.