FCC Waives Rules For Foreign Paramount Ownership

There is a fence across the road of American broadcasting. It went up in the years when a wireless set was a nerve of the fleet and not a comfort of the parlour, and it says that no foreign power may hold more than a modest share of a company that speaks over the American air. The reformer, having examined it, reports that it leads nowhere and guards nothing. The Commission may therefore take it down for the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, who would like a larger stake in Paramount. But a fence nobody can explain is not thereby shown to be useless. It is only shown to have outlived its explainers. Go away and find out what it was for, and then come back and we shall talk about the crowbar.

The usual explanation is that the fence kept spies from the transmitters. The reformer is quite right that this is now quaint, since a television network is not a radar station and nobody has ever stolen a state secret by buying a sitcom. But the fence was never really about towers. It was about the oldest question a speaker must answer before opening their mouth, which is whom they are trying not to offend. A broadcaster licensed to use the public air is supposed to have one answer, and the answer is the public. Every share held by a foreign sovereign is a small second answer.

Grant the opposing case its full strength, for it is not stupid. The Gulf states are friends of Washington, or at least excellent customers of it. A large media company’s appetite for capital is perennial. A passive stake is not a controlling stake, and the statute itself, in its good sense, lets the Commission permit more where the public interest is served. Nobody proposes that Riyadh should sit in the editor’s chair. Very well. Nobody ever needs to. A guest fed at another’s table does not require to be told which subjects are unsuitable to the conversation. The instinct is the whole mechanism. The pressure of a patron is never a command. It is a silence that the dependent party supplies unasked, and it is therefore, by design, unprovable.

That is the first turn, and it is the familiar one. The second is stranger, and the reformers have missed it because it hides in the word “waiver.”

The old rule was a wall, and a wall is admirably democratic. It stood in the same place for everybody and needed no one’s goodwill. A waiver is a door with a doorkeeper. Here the doorkeeper is a Commission under Brendan Carr, which has made the content of broadcasts its liveliest concern, and what discretion grants, discretion may review. So Paramount acquires not one new master but two: the sovereigns who hold the shares, and the regulator who holds the permission for them to hold it. The deregulator has produced the most supervised arrangement imaginable, a company whose owners and licensor must both be kept pleased, and has called it liberalisation because a rule was removed. The rule is gone. The power has merely changed its address.

Here is the joke, and it is a serious one. The Commission is vigilant about what is said on the air and incurious about who has paid for the saying, when the second question is the older and the surer guide to the first. Anyone who wanted to know what a newspaper would say about a government could read its editorials. Anyone who wanted to know what it would never say could read its share register.

Nor is the danger the crude one, of a prince telephoning to demand a story be killed. A telephone call is a scandal, and scandals can be reported. The danger is that the wall which made such calls unnecessary to fear has been replaced by a gate whose keeper is also a critic of the coverage. The company that once had nothing to placate now has two parties to placate, and can never quite tell which of them a given caution is for.

Picture a producer at a desk some evening soon, with a script about the Gulf open on the screen and a cursor resting on a sentence that is accurate, sourced and a little sharp. No one has telephoned. No one has ever telephoned. The producer will simply pause, as people pause when they feel a hand on a door somewhere behind them, and that sentence will be the one that goes.