The FCC Chair Warns Broadcasters About Airing 'Fake Polls'
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, warned broadcasters about airing 'fake polls,' amplifying one of the complaints President Trump has regularly made about the news media. In a post on X, Carr said that many journalists and broadcasters have been airing those polls 'without regard to basic journalistic ethics' and without informing the public that the polls lack a scientific, accurate or even real basis. Broadcasters, he advised, should avoid 'News Distortions' or 'Broadcast Hoaxes' by airing polls that would violate their regulatory obligations.
One small polling outfit was exposed as a hoax this week, and a similar incident occurred in August. The standard Carr points to is not a new one — it is whatever a broadcaster's existing regulatory obligations already require; the striking part is who is offering the reminder, and in what vocabulary.
A sitting FCC chairman telling broadcasters which polls are legitimate is a notable escalation of a president's running complaint into a regulator's mouth. The reminder also lands on real ground: polling that was invented and then exposed is a genuine problem for any newsroom that aired it.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The wording is doing two jobs at once: 'advised' is soft, but 'News Distortions' and 'Broadcast Hoaxes' are not, and a post that tells journalists their polls lack 'a scientific, accurate, or even real basis' is not really a suggestion. Anyone on the receiving end has to decide how much of a warning this is, and the phrase 'regulatory obligations' is the part that will keep a news director up at night.
The simplest reading is less conspiratorial: Carr asked broadcasters to give viewers more context about polls they had covered. And the hoax was real — a small polling outfit was exposed this week, after a similar case in August — and news outlets did report on those hoaxes, which is exactly the context being demanded.