The FCC must conduct a “thorough review” of the foreign investors backing Paramount Skydance‘s $111 billion proposed deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, seven Democratic senators said in a letter addressed to agency chairman Brendan Carr.
The senators, led by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), expressed “deep concern” that sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Chinese gaming and internet giant Tencent “are providing billions in financing for the merger.” The deal would give Paramount Skydance ownership of WBD properties including CNN, HBO Max and Warner Bros.’s movie and TV studios.
“This constellation of foreign investment from China and from Gulf states, with complex and sometimes competing relationships with the United States, demands rigorous, not perfunctory, review,” the senators wrote.
Reps for the FCC and Paramount Skydance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Financing for Paramount Skydance’s WBD deal includes funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA). Paramount’s offer for WBD as of Dec. 1 included an aggregate of $24 billion from the Middle Eastern funds, per an SEC filing. Since then, the company has not disclosed how much the three funds are contributing toward its winning bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, which WBD’s board of directors accepted last month after Netflix opted to not counter Paramount’s $31/share offer.
In December, Paramount said Tencent, which had committed $1 billion to the Paramount Skydance bid, was no longer a financing partner because of the WBD board’s concerns over foreign ownership. However, earlier this month, Tencent was back on board as an investor in the deal with fresh funding, Bloomberg reported.
Paramount Skydance has claimed in SEC filings that the three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds “have agreed to forgo any governance rights — including board representation — associated with their non-voting equity investments.” According to Paramount, that means the deal “will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction,” referring to the U.S.’s intra-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, led by the Treasury Department, which reviews foreign investments in American businesses for potential national security risks.
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Booker, who serves as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, was joined by six other U.S. senators in the letter to the FCC’s Carr: Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Democratic Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Earlier this month, Warren and Blumenthal slammed the Trump administration’s Treasury Department for failing to initiate a CFIUS national security review of Paramount Skydance‘s WBD deal.
In the March 23 letter, the seven senators said they have “grave concerns” about Tencent having a stake in the parent company of CBS News and CNN. The company’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, along with the Chinese government’s law requiring domestic technology companies to cooperate with state intelligence services on demand, “creates multiple avenues for foreign influence over America’s journalists and content,” according to the senators.
Paramount’s claims that the foreign investors will hold no governance rights “demand careful independent verification,” the senators wrote. However, “Even as non-governing partners, their massive investment creates significant opportunity for soft power and influence over CNN’s editorial decisions and business priorities.”
The letter continued: “That concern extends beyond our borders. CNN International is distributed in over 200 countries and territories, and CNN Newsource is the world’s most extensively relied-upon news service, partnering with over 1,000 local and international news organisations around the world. The potential for foreign government influence over American journalism at home and abroad is not hypothetical. It is structural, and it is unchecked.”
The senators concluded, “The FCC’s foreign ownership review process exists for exactly this moment. American broadcast infrastructure is not merely a commercial asset; it is a critical component of our national information environment. The Communications Act charges the Commission with protecting the public interest. We urge the Commission to honour that charge.”
The senators’ letter is available at this link.
The senators are urging the FCC to conduct a full and independent Section 310(b) review of all foreign ownership interests in the Paramount-WBD transaction, including Tencent and all Gulf sovereign wealth funds, before any approval is granted. The politicians also asked that the FCC deny any confidentiality requests to Paramount and require it to “publicly file all instruments documenting the foreign investment commitments in this transaction including equity commitment letters, subscription agreements, side letters, and any commercial agreements between the foreign investors and the combined entity.”
The FCC also should issue a public request for information and public comment specifically focused on the foreign investment components of this transaction, according to the senators’ letter. In addition, the FCC should coordinate with CFIUS, the Justice Department’s National Security Division and “relevant intelligence agencies before concluding that any component of the financing is risk-free.”
The senators also called on the FCC to “reject the premise that a deal of this magnitude that involves the broadcast licenses for CBS, significant news operations including CNN, and major content distribution infrastructure, warrants only minimal FCC involvement.”
In the letter, the senators cited Carr’s remarks at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on March 3, 2026, in which he described Paramount Skydance’s WBD proposal as “cleaner” than Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. and predicted it would be approved “pretty quickly.” In addition, Carr said the FCC’s role would be “minimal” in the approval process and described the foreign investment component as warranting only a “very quick, almost pro-forma review.”
“These statements indicate that the Commission has no intention of conducting a meaningful inquiry into the merger — a concern only deepened as the full scope of foreign investment in the transaction has come to light,” the Democratic senators wrote.
From Variety US