FCC chairman Brendan Carr on Thursday praised Skydance Media’s commitment to hire an ombudsman for CBS News after it completes its merger with Paramount Global.
The commitment was outlined in a filing with the FCC this week. Skydance also said that would ensure that any diversity, equity and inclusion policies are ended.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Carr said, “I was very pleased to see Skydance put in a filing that says, ‘If this deal goes through, they are committing to serious changes at CBS. I think that would be a good thing. They’ve committed to addressing bias issues. They committed to embracing fact based journalism. They’ve also committed to either not extending or removing hideous forms of DEI discrimination. I think those are all significant that they’ve offered. And so we’ll take a look at that.”
In its filing, Skydance said that the ombudsman role “will be in place for a period of two years, and will report to the president of the new Paramount company. Emphasizing that the commitment was voluntary, Skydance said that the ombudsman will ‘promote transparency and accountability.’”
Skydance also said that it “will ensure that the company’s array of news and entertainment programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum, consistent with the varying perspectives of the viewing audience. Skydance recognizes that, as a broadcast licensee, it will be charged with operating in the public interest, and the company intends to undertake a comprehensive review of CBS and make any necessary changes to ensure compliance with that standard. In all respects, Skydance will ensure that CBS’s reporting is fair, unbiased and fact-based.”
Carr did not say when a decision will be made on the merger or if the full commission will weigh in.
Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the commission, blasted Skydance’s filing. She said that the company had agreed to “cowardly capitulate to adopt never before seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial content. This is a direct violation of the First Amendment. … The company also said it will comply with its agency’s ideological demands to undermine efforts to combat discrimination and expand equal opportunity.”
Skydance has said that its commitments are voluntary, and the ombudsman role was also a commitment that Comcast made as part of its merger with NBCUniversal.
But Gomez said that what Skydance has done is a commitment to a role that will “serve as a check on the news division, and that is what want. … You hear over and over again … complaints about how the networks report the news. It is unfair. It is biased. They’re constantly complaining about it, which, by the way, I find very rich that we keep talking about the loss of trust in journalism when this administration has spent the last 10 years sowing this trust in mainstream media. So I think it’s really problematic that this was done in order to gain approval of a transaction from a regulatory agency that should not be interfering in the freedom of the press.”