There was a four year span where Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr simply couldn’t stop hyperventilating about the fact that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was Chinese. Carr would appear on cable news pretty much every week to endlessly rant about the potential propaganda, privacy, and NatSec impact of what was (at best) fairly murky Chinese government influence over TikTok.
You might also recall that “we” “fixed” the “TikTok problem” by forcing a sale of the company to Donald Trump’s billionaire friends like Larry Ellison, who are every bit as bad — if not worse — than previous ownership. Carr never mentioned TikTok again. TikTok’s previous ownership at least tried to behave to remain in the U.S.; guys like Larry Ellison face no such oversight concerns.
Fast forward a few years. Larry Ellison is about to close a massive $111 billion merger between CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers. Almost 50 percent of that deal’s financing is coming from the Saudi government (you remember, the bone saw guys), Qatar, and the Chinese, raising all sorts of valid questions about potential foreign impact on news coverage and U.S. media.
Hypocritically, Brendan Carr and his Republican allies at the FCC see absolutely no problem with this, and have rubber stamped their approval of the deal (and the funding from autocratic governments). Paramount and Trump underlings say it’s all fine because the foreign governments won’t technically have voting rights.
The problem: there’s nothing that prevents them from obtaining voting rights later, and they’ll still have influence. The Communications Act technically prohibits foreign governments from owning more than 25% of the capital stock or voting rights in a parent company controlling broadcast licenses. But it also allows the FCC to ignore this cap if the agency feels that doing so “serves the public interest.”
To Brendan Carr, cementing a corrupt authoritarian global right wing propaganda alliance serves authoritarian, corporate, and government interests, so that’s good enough — apparently.
Understandably, consumer rights groups like Free Press were unenthusiastic about yet more U.S. media consolidation and the potential for foreign influence over our already propaganda-heavy news:
“Control over for-profit, commercial domestic news media by any government is an extraordinary situation that would surely strike most Americans as unseemly, precisely because of the utility of the news media as a propaganda tool for those governments.”
There is simply nothing that’s ideologically consistent about Brendan Carr outside of his feckless obedience to Trump Incorporated. He’ll wax poetic about free speech while destroying free speech. He’ll ramble endlessly about a healthy media ecosystem while illegally destroying media consolidation limits. He’ll pay lip service to innovation while dismantling all competition safeguards.
With Democratic state AGs pathetically folding to demands for settlement, Larry Ellison’s (and his global autocratic allies’) dreams of dominating what’s left of U.S. corporate media are full steam ahead.