The saga of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger that not many individuals appear to need apart from one failson and his billionaire daddy continues. The Federal Communications Fee (FCC) simply introduced that it is waiving its personal guidelines concerning overseas fairness possession, in keeping with a report by The Verge.
The rule states that overseas entities can solely come clean with 25 p.c of media corporations that broadcast on public airwaves, and Paramount owns 28 TV such stations. Fortuitously for David and Larry Ellison, the completely non-political FCC has determined to permit a stake of 49.5 p.c by a trio of wealth funds coming from the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. That is proper. Three Gulf states will personal almost half of Paramount-Warner Bros. if this merger goes by.
Don’t be concerned although. The FCC says these entities “won’t be able to wield any affect, not to mention management, over selections involving the Licensees.” It is because the inventory choices do not include official voting rights.
NEWS: The FCC authorized Paramount’s request to let overseas traders — together with sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar — personal greater than 25% of its fairness, clearing a regulatory hurdle tied to its WBD buy. This is the ruling’s breakdown of the investments: pic.twitter.com/VMakQfaSbV
— Daniel Miller (@DanielNMiller) September 17, 2026
Now I am only a humble tech reporter who’s confused by the methods of massive enterprise, however could not three entities that personal half of a large media conglomerate sway voters in a myriad of how even whereas not sitting within the boardroom? They might personal half of the corporate, which actually grants a degree of affect and management, it doesn’t matter what the FCC would love us to imagine.
Additionally, this could possibly be only the start. The petition truly requested the FCC for permission to permit overseas entities to come clean with one hundred pc of Paramount-Warner Bros., which was granted. The fee did placed on its large boy pants and say the corporate must difficulty one other request for these teams to achieve voting shares. In order that they must ask properly earlier than handing over absolute management. Fairly daring stance FCC.
The advocacy group Free Press and numerous Democrats are towards the transfer. “Management over for-profit, business home information media by any authorities is a unprecedented state of affairs that may certainly strike most People as unseemly, exactly due to the utility of the information media as a propaganda instrument for these governments,” Free Press instructed Selection.
“Ellison, authorized fixer Makan Delrahim, and different Paramount mouthpieces are speed-running by the 4 phases of grasping company grief: abandonment, astroturf, antisemitism and assholery.
They’re, as the children say, crashing out.” – @notaaroncraig.bsky.social
— Free Press (@freepress.bsky.social) 2026-09-16T22:05:14.529Z
Anna Gomez, who’s the one Democratic member of the FCC, responded that the group “simply let a few of the most repressive governments on the planet not directly management almost all of a mixed Paramount-Warner Bros. An funding this huge in considered one of America’s greatest media corporations does not simply purchase fairness, it secures affect over what will get mentioned and made.”
After all, the elephant within the room is the FCC itself. Since Trump received elected, Brendan Carr and his group has repeatedly threatened channels for airing stuff it did not like, tried to dam stations from platforming individuals it did not like, censored late-night TV hosts and tried to bully journalists. So it appears it reserves all of its actual enamel for, uh, People and never international wealth funds with their very own agendas.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. merger remains to be up within the air pending an antitrust go well with filed by California and 11 different states. A trial is ready to start subsequent March.
