FCC Waives Rules For Foreign Paramount Ownership

Look at how this was made. A rule is a piece of joinery: someone cut it, fitted it, and expected it to carry weight. A waiver is what you see when the joiner is told to leave one joint open for one particular customer. The Federal Communications Commission, under Brendan Carr, has set aside its limits so that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi may hold a larger share of Paramount than the rules allow. Examine the seam. There is no new principle in it, no argument that the old ceiling was mistaken and should be lowered or raised for everyone. There is only an exception cut to the measure of particular buyers, and the workmanship of an exception is always the same: the wall stands everywhere except where someone with a key wished to pass.

The strongest defence deserves a full hearing. Paramount needs capital. Gulf sovereign funds have often been patient, quiet shareholders who ask for returns and not for editorial favours. The ceiling on foreign holdings was drawn in an age of different money, and arbitrary ceilings ought to be doubted. Nor is it obvious that a large stake buys a voice in a newsroom. I grant all of it. The fault lies less in the loss of the limit than in the manner of its loss. A limit applied to all comers, and so obliged no one to be grateful. A waiver reverses this. What the rule once withheld as a matter of law, the commission now bestows as a matter of grace, and grace creates a creditor.

Consider who stands where. Carr’s commission decides the fate of broadcast licences and the mergers that surround them; it may approve or delay, investigate or let lie. The three Gulf governments hold cheques of a size few American institutions can refuse. Paramount, with licences to protect and a balance sheet to mend, stands between them and needs the goodwill of both. Each discretion is defensible taken alone. Together they lean on the same newsroom from two sides, and neither leaves a mark, because neither ever needs to be exercised. Influence of this kind is not commanded. It is anticipated.

Here the commission’s habits become instructive. This is a body that has taken a lively interest in what broadcasters say, in complaints about distortion and inquiries into fairness, while relaxing its interest in who pays for the saying. It is an inspector who examines the carving on the capitals through a lens, weighing every leaf and grimace for heresy, and never asks whose weight the arch has been built to bear. The carving is visible, and scrutinising it makes an agency look busy. The foundation is buried, and scrutinising it makes an agency look slow. But a sentence is freed or bound at the ledger long before it reaches the script, and no complaint can be lodged against a sentence that was never written.

Picture the editor, late in the evening, in one of Paramount’s newsrooms, with a report on the internal affairs of a Gulf kingdom open on the screen. Nobody telephones. Nobody needs to. The editor reads the third paragraph once more than usual, considers for a moment who owns the building, and lets an adjective soften by a single degree. No memo records it. No commissioner will ever find it. This is what a waiver builds, and it is a far more delicate thing than censorship, which is at least visible and can be fought. It builds a small, uncredited courtesy, performed by a person who was never asked to perform it and who could not say afterwards, honestly, that they had been pressed.

That is the quality of the thing, and the quality is the testimony. A newsroom is the work of many minds permitted to judge, and its worth depends on whether those minds feel the ground beneath them as their own. An ownership structure shaped by exception, by favour to buyers on one side and by regulatory appetite on the other, teaches every mind in the building to look up before it looks at the page. The FCC has fitted the stone to the buyers, and the fitting is very neat.

Go and read the sentence afterwards. It will be perfectly grammatical, and it will be smooth. The smoothness is the seam.