Under Executive Chairwoman Shari Redstone, Paramount Global has taken steps to assuage concerns in the Trump administration over news coverage at CBS. On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission approved the sale of Paramount to Skydance.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
On Wednesday, Trey Parker and Matt Stone – the creators of the satirical show South Park – announced they had struck a $1.5 billion, five-year streaming rights deal with Paramount Global.
On Wednesday night, Parker and Stone’s long delayed season debut on Paramount’s Comedy Central channel torched the company for cancelling the CBS Late Show with Stephen Colbert – implying that it was done solely to appease one of Colbert’s frequent targets: President Trump. (A cartoon Trump is shown naked in bed with Satan. It is not an appealing depiction. Nor was it intended to be.)
Paramount Global has said Colbert’s cancellation, effective next June, was done solely for financial reasons. It has nonetheless occurred amid a flurry of concrete actions taken by Paramount and the Ellison family, which has been seeking to acquire the media conglomerate, to appease the Trump administration.
On Thursday, federal regulators announced they had voted to approve the deal valued at $8 billion.
Paramount paid $16 million to resolve a lawsuit filed by Trump as a private individual against CBS and 60 Minutes. David Ellison and his company Skydance Media promised to eliminate all U.S.-based DEI programs at Paramount and to create a new ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias in its news coverage. Skydance has not denied Trump’s claims the network will run $20 million worth of public service announcements consistent with his ideological beliefs.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr cited Skydance’s promises to make “significant changes in the once storied CBS broadcast network.”
On Fox News earlier in the day, Carr took a victory lap over Colbert’s cancellation and other concessions by CBS, as well as the stripping of federal funding from public media. “You’ve exposed the business model of a lot of these outfits as being nothing more than a partisan circus,” Carr said on Fox News. “All of this is downstream of President Trump’s decision to stand up.”
Skydance and Paramount declined comment.
Last week, Ellison met with Carr to underscore “Skydance’s commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS’s editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers,” as Ellison’s lawyer later wrote in official filings.
David Ellison’s father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is now ultimately the controlling owner of Paramount. It had been controlled by Shari Redstone, who wanted to cash out the stake in the remains of her father, Sumner Redstone’s vast media holdings and who had concluded the company was too small to compete with the larger digital titans Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
