With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has put every licensed broadcast network in America on notice: air a poll the agency considers fake, and the station behind it could be answering for news distortion or a broadcast hoax. His own Democratic colleague on the commission, and free-press advocates, say the warning itself crosses a line.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued the warning in a post on X on Wednesday, writing that this election season has brought "a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm." Carr accused journalists and broadcasters of "amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis."
"The FCC takes these issues seriously," Carr wrote. "Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes." He said stations that choose to air polls can give viewers additional context and information "consistent with FCC regulations," and he stressed that broadcasters must comply with their public interest obligations. Carr named no specific poll, network or journalist in the post. The FCC did not immediately respond when Reuters asked whether the commission would issue formal guidance on polls, and Comcast-owned NBC, Skydance-owned CBS, ABC and Fox did not immediately comment.
"Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations."
The two rules Carr invoked were not written with election polling in mind. The FCC's news distortion policy holds that a distortion "must involve a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report," and the commission says broadcasters face potential penalties only where they deliberately distort a factual news report — "expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable." The broadcast hoax rule, Section 73.1217 of the FCC's regulations, bars a station from broadcasting false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe when the station knows the information is false, when it is foreseeable the broadcast will cause substantial public harm, and when the broadcast in fact directly causes that harm — defined as immediate damage to property or to public health and safety, or the diversion of law enforcement and emergency services. Penalties under FCC rules can include federal fines, and a station's licence, granted on the condition that it serve the public interest, is what Carr says is on the line.
The warning did not arrive in a vacuum. It came one day after the news site FiftyPlusOne reported that it had caught Wedgewood Polls, an election survey company, fabricating polling data. Wedgewood said on Tuesday that the fake data was an "experiment" meant to expose the lack of oversight of polling credibility and methodology. "Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public; it was designed as a wake-up call," the company said. "If a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations, the standards for how polling data is vetted, aggregated, and reported must change." Wedgewood said its numbers had been cited as credible by major news organizations, and Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow said its polls showing her trailing an opponent led to decreased donations, prompted reporters to ask her to drop out of the race and discouraged campaign volunteers.
Carr's post is the latest move in a year-long campaign against the broadcast networks. In April, he ordered an unprecedented early licence review for all eight of Disney's company-owned ABC television stations. Earlier this year, the FCC said late-night and daytime talk shows are no longer bona fide news programs exempt from the equal time rules for interviews with political candidates — after which ABC's "The View" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live" stopped interviewing candidates on broadcast programs, Disney confirmed in a filing. Last year, Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air after Carr threatened ABC over comments the host made following the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called on Carr to punish journalists, made the same complaint about polling on Monday: "I think it's fake polls. Polls mean something but a lot of the polls are rigged."
The pushback came from inside the commission itself. Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the three-member commission, answered Carr on X: "Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong. FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith." Gomez said last month that a news distortion violation would require "a deliberate misrepresentation of something of significant importance," and that a poll turning out to be incorrect — which is not uncommon — was "not something that I would say fits within the news distortion policy." The Freedom of the Press Foundation was blunter. "Brendan Carr is not the journalism police," its chief of advocacy, Seth Stern, said, adding that "news broadcasters have a First Amendment right to report polling data, even if it proves to be inaccurate," and that FCC policies on hoaxes and distortions "must be applied narrowly to avoid clashing with the Constitution, if they can be constitutionally applied at all."
For now, the warning is only a warning: no rule has been changed, no enforcement case has been announced, and the commission has not said what evidence it would require or how a complaint over a poll would be judged. But it lands in the final stretch of a midterm campaign that will decide control of Congress, with networks deciding every day which polls to put on air. Carr closed his post with the standard he says those decisions will be measured against: "It is important that broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations. After all, the country benefits greatly when Americans can trust and rely on the media to report the news fairly and accurately."