FCC chair took $75,000 in gala tickets from a company he regulates

Two watchdog groups have asked federal ethics officials to investigate whether the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of his colleagues broke the rules by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount, a company whose $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros Discovery still needs the commission's approval.

The tickets were for the Kennedy Center honors gala, an annual event that CBS sponsors and broadcasts. The complaints, from the Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follow a ProPublica investigation into how long the practice has run and how much it is worth.

Federal ethics rules bar employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with their agency, is regulated by it, or is seeking official action from it. Paramount is all three.

What the disclosures show

Chairman Brendan Carr's financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since he joined the commission in 2017, worth more than $75,000 in total. His latest filing lists tickets for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390.

There is a gap in that accounting. ProPublica reported that Carr sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala alongside Paramount's chief executive, David Ellison, and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Kennedy Center guidelines put the price of such seats at $125,000 each.

Carr did not respond to ProPublica's request to explain the difference between the two figures. The commission released his disclosure late on a Friday, more than a month after ProPublica asked for it, and the document says the agency certified it on June 22.

Carr is not the only one. Commissioner Olivia Trusty's most recent disclosure records two tickets to the December 2025 gala together worth more than $12,000. Trusty and Carr were the two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount's earlier merger with Skydance. The third, Anna Gomez, voted against it.

Across the commission the pattern is old. ProPublica's analysis of ethics disclosures found that seven of the ten commissioners who have served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000 between them.

The timing that draws attention

One sequence is doing most of the work in the complaints. Hours after last year's honors gala ended, Paramount announced a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, the move that became the merger agreement now waiting on the FCC.

About three months later, Carr went on CNBC and publicly endorsed the deal, promising swift approval. The Democracy Defenders Fund, which is led by Norman Eisen, a former ambassador and White House ethics counsel under President Barack Obama, filed its complaint on July 30.

The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits.

The group sent its grievance to three places at once: the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC's inspector general and the commission's own ethics office. It asks them to examine whether Carr and Trusty broke gift rules or the criminal statute on illegal gratuities.

Its requested remedies are specific. Carr and Trusty should repay Paramount the fair market value of any improper gift. The federal Office of Government Ethics should hold off certifying Carr's annual disclosure until he shows he has complied. And Carr should be disqualified from any further part in the commission's decision on the merger.

The second complaint, from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asks the FCC's inspector general to open its own investigation. The group is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee lawyer who later worked in the Biden White House.

With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn't met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.

What the agency says

Carr, Trusty and the commission did not respond to ProPublica's requests for comment, and the inspector general declined to comment. The agency's position, given to ProPublica earlier, is that its ethics officers have cleared commissioners to accept these tickets for years and found the practice consistent with ethics law.

Paramount's account is that this is old hospitality rather than lobbying. The company's communications chief described a decades-long "CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties" to the show. Carr, defending the Skydance approval last year, said it "advances the public interest."

Why it matters for the deal

The commission's review is one of the last federal steps left before Paramount can combine with Warner Bros Discovery. That deal would put Paramount Plus and HBO Max, CBS and CNN, and a long list of broadcast and cable channels under one owner.

It is also under heavy legal attack elsewhere. Twelve states have sued to block it, and the Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project have filed challenges of their own. A federal judge in California set an antitrust trial for March 2027.

Paramount has agreed to hold the merger in place until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. That gives the ethics complaints time to run, and it gives the commission time to decide whether its chairman should be the one signing off.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by taking the tickets, Carr and Trusty had compromised the commission's impartiality and should stay out of any decision on the merger. Walter Shaub, who ran the Office of Government Ethics until 2017, told ProPublica that repaying a ticket's face value removes the requirement to recuse, though not the reason to.

What happens next

None of the three bodies that received the complaints has said whether it will investigate. An inspector general can open a review without announcing it, and the Office of Government Ethics cannot punish anyone directly, though it can decline to certify a filing. Recusal carries its own complication: the commission needs three members to act, so a stand aside could leave it unable to decide at all.

The practical question is narrower than the legal one. If Carr does not step aside, the official who promised swift approval of this merger on television, and who watched the gala from a skybox with the buyer's chief executive, will help decide whether it goes through.

The FCC has not said when it will rule, and its review of foreign investment in the deal has no published timetable. Britain's competition authority cleared the merger on August 6 and the Justice Department cleared it earlier this year, which leaves the commission holding one of the few remaining federal decisions. ProPublica's reporting established the practice; these complaints ask whether it was lawful.

What is actually at stake

For readers the stake is simple enough. The people deciding whether two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood may become one have been guests of one of them, at prices most of the audience for their decision will never see.