Carr wasn’t the only member of the FCC to have accepted gifts from the company. Commissioner Olivia Trusty, who ProPublica notes cast a decisive vote for the Paramount Skydance merger, was gifted $12,000 worth of tickets by the company for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors Gala, which honored performers like Kiss, Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone. Carr also attended and watched from a private skybox with executives including David Ellison. Those seats cost $125,000, though it’s not yet confirmed whether these were a gift from Paramount, as Carr hasn’t yet publicly shared his financial disclosure from last year. Either way, it’s not a good look, to put it very mildly; this was less than three months before Paramount beat out Netflix for the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which is supposed to be completed later this year. According to the report, Carr has accepted tickets at least seven times since 2017, totaling over $63,000.
While the amount Carr and Trusty received from Paramount is obviously peanuts compared to the millions of dollars President Donald Trump has received from the entertainment industry in his second term, it’s still a blatant ethics violation, according to the experts who spoke to ProPublica. Ethics rules bar government employees from taking gifts from any entity they do business with, and experts say that this should bar Carr and Trusty from participating in any upcoming decisions about the merger. Though it’s been common for FCC commissioners to take tickets or gifts from CBS and Paramount for the Kennedy Center, the sources point out it was always wrong, regardless of what party the president they worked under was part of. Said one expert, “It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time… government officials [are] supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”
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