FCC Waives Rules For Foreign Paramount Ownership

It was announced, with the composure of a man reading out the tide tables, that the Federal Communications Commission will set aside its own rules so that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi may hold a larger piece of Paramount than those rules permit. One wonders, in the plainest way, what the rules were for, since they turn out to be waivable by the very commission that enforces them. That makes them less a rule than a suggestion with a letterhead.

I want to be fair, because the other side has a respectable case, and respectable cases suffer most from an unfair hearing. The ceiling on foreign ownership of broadcast licenses is old. Congress set it in 1934, for a radio world that has since been replaced several times over, and money has never had much patriotism in it. Paramount needs capital the way any house needs a roof, and the fellows who turn up with shingles are the ones with the cash. The strongest form of the argument is that a stake with no vote cannot edit a headline. I grant it. The Gulf governments will never need to.

But notice what the fair case argues against. It argues against the rule, and nobody has done that. Congress wrote the ceiling, a commission has stepped over it, and the difference matters more than either party is eager to say. If the stake is harmless, the rule was decoration for the better part of a century, and someone ought to say so in the room where laws are made. If the stake is dangerous, a waiver is a peculiar thing to hand out. The national security question, which is what the rule was supposedly for, has been answered by an office that gains a good deal of leverage by answering yes. Either way, the matter has moved from a statute, which is public, to a favour, which is private. A statute does not care who you are. A favour cares a great deal.

Any schoolboy understands this. A hall pass is worth more to the teacher than to the boy, because whoever holds one has agreed, without a word spoken, to the teacher’s opinion of where a boy ought to be. Paramount now holds a pass. Brendan Carr’s FCC issued it, and whoever sits in that chair can look at it again. The same commission decides a great many other matters that a broadcaster would like decided kindly. Its critics say this is a commission more interested in what goes out over the air than in who pays for the sending. If so, the waiver is not a lapse in vigilance at all. It is vigilance, pointed at a different door.

Picture an editor in Paramount’s news division on an ordinary afternoon, with a draft on the screen that touches one of the Gulf’s more delicate subjects. Nobody has called. Nobody will. The stake is passive, remember, and the waiver is lawful, and everyone has been scrupulous. The editor reads the draft anyway, the way one reads a letter one suspects the mother-in-law will also read, and makes it a shade more agreeable. That shade is the whole product. It appears in no filing, which is exactly why it is worth having.

And there are two mothers-in-law. Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi are one; the signature on the pass is the other. They will disagree about most things. They will agree that the letter should be pleasant.

I had hoped a rule with national security written on its face would be argued with a little before it was retired. It was merely excused, politely, and the company is now richer in friends than any company should want to be.

The boy with the hall pass walks the corridor very straight, and the teacher, watching, takes it for character.