SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
The Federal Communications Commission has approved an $8 billion merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media. That approval yesterday came less than a month after Paramount paid $16 million to settle President Trump's lawsuit against CBS News, which is owned by Paramount. Democratic lawmakers are questioning whether that was effectively a bribe. NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik is going to walk us through the story. Morning, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Morning, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: David, you have reported that Paramount and Skydance made a lot of concessions to get this deal done. Outline some of those.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, take what we saw from federal filings that the head of Skydance, David Ellison - the son of Trump supporter Larry Ellison, the digital titan who founded Oracle - in a meeting and in subsequent submissions said that he would promise, essentially, to get rid of all diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives that Paramount had embraced in recent years. You know, a major thing for the administration. Something that they've sought to force law firms and universities to get rid of.
They promised to embrace a kind of ideological diversity, which actually sounds good. And fight against ideological bias, seemingly accepting the proposition from the administration that CBS News had been biased. Setting up an ombudsman, which is not in and of itself a terrible thing, for the next two years. And Paramount had announced that it was getting rid of Stephen Colbert, you know, "The Late Show." It said this was a purely financial decision. But it coming so close to when this deal would be approved or not by the Federal Communications Commission, people inside CBS, CBS News and Colbert himself, obviously, are of the belief that this was a directly related decision.
PFEIFFER: You reminded me that I saw a statement from the FCC commissioner about the sale saying this will get DEI and bias out of media reporting. So they've explicitly said that. David, remind us, why was Paramount up for sale in the first place? And who exactly is the buyer, Skydance?
FOLKENFLIK: So as I mentioned, Skydance is controlled by the Ellison family. That's Larry Ellison, the digital titan, his son David Ellison, who runs Skydance. Skydance produced a lot of movies including, for example, the "Mission Impossible" movies of Tom Cruise and had done business with Paramount Pictures, which is part of Paramount.
Paramount is sort of - the controlling owner is Shari Redstone. You know, it's a big media company. It owns Comedy Central. It owns CBS, CBS News. It owns Paramount Pictures and other properties like Nickelodeon. But it isn't big enough, really, to compete with the titans of streaming, Netflix and Apple and Amazon and the like. And they didn't really have a Plan B. They thought, if we can sell these billionaires, we can do a lot better. Shari Redstone wanted out.
PFEIFFER: David, what does this merger tell you about how things appear to be getting done in Washington these days?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, you mentioned that $16 million settlement. That was to settle a private lawsuit filed by President Trump as an individual before he came back into office. And yet Trump's chairman of FCC revived what had been a dismissed investigation into CBS. That seemed to have the ability to gum up the approval of this very deal, valued at $8 billion, that that same regulatory body, the FCC, had to approve.
And what it tells you, in a sense - and what people are deriving from this, whether universities or law firms or whatever - that for a lot of folks, it's worth paying the money to Trump as a private citizen. It's worth agreeing to whatever you have to agree to, even jettisoning stars - despite the network's denial that that's why they got rid of Colbert - to do what it takes to appease Trump and his, you know, tight coterie of advisers around him to get the deal done. That is a tough burden to bear. And it tells you that these things aren't being done necessarily on the merits but on the exercise of power.
PFEIFFER: NPR's David Folkenflik. Thank you.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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