FCC Chair Says CBS-Trump Settlement Talks Have Nothing to Do With Paramount-Skydance Deal Review

Source: The Wrap

April 28, 2025 @ 4:36 PM


FCC chairman Brendan Carr sidestepped a question during a Monday press conference about how a potential settlement of President Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over its “60 Minutes” Kamala Harris interview could impact agency’s review of the Paramount-Skydance deal.

“The settlement and any discussions around that have nothing to do with the work that we’re doing at the FCC,” Carr said. “There’s at least three different things are going on: There’s the litigation, which we’re not a part of and there’s been no discussions about, there is the transaction that’s before us and there is the CBS news distortion [complaint]. And we’re taking those last two, running our normal course.”

“On the [Paramount-Skydance] transaction itself, we are getting close to the informal 180 day clock. I think we’re somewhere in the 160s but we’re just running our normal process across a lot of different transactions right now,” he added. “We’re just going to apply the law and the facts and the record and move forward. We are simply focused on the record that’s before us, and we’re going to make our decision based on the agency’s record itself.”

Despite Carr’s claim that the FCC’s work is unrelated to the lawsuit, the agency made the transcript and camera footage of the interview public as part of a “news distortion” investigation. He previously said that a “news distortion” complaint from conservative law firm The Center for American Rights over the interview would likely arise in the agency’s review of the Skydance transaction. The final deadline for the public comment period ended on March 24.

Read more: https://www.thewrap.com/fcc-brendan-carr-cbs-trump-settlement-talks-60-minutes-investigation/