Threaten the Broadcasters. Find the Broadcast Later.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr wants broadcasters to do their homework. On October 29, asked whether they had actually aired the fabricated polls behind his warning, he said he did not know whether stations had aired segments on the examples he cited. The assignment apparently has different deadlines for the people holding licenses and the man reminding them of it.

Our October 24 filing covered a warning that named no offending station. Thursday added something more revealing than another missing name. Carr’s October 21 post had asserted that “Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls” without basic journalistic care. Asked for specific broadcasts again by Reuters, he said he would consult his team about concerns, “if any.” The public accusation had acquired a qualification: he would have to ask.

Carr has a legitimate point about fabricated surveys. Wedgewood admitted inventing polling data, and newsrooms should check what they repeat. He told reporters that politicians of both parties had complained about fake polls hurting their campaigns. He also rejected the suggestion that he wanted to punish coverage simply because a poll was negative for a politician, explicitly excluding good-faith reporting on existing polls. That distinction deserves to survive the argument. A made-up survey is different from a real survey that disappoints somebody important.

His explanation also invoked older FCC cases involving broadcasters conducting telephone polls without disclosing their scientific limitations. Asked whether the agency was investigating current broadcasts, he invited people to raise concerns about broadcasters participating in production. Those are arguments for scrutiny of deliberate misconduct, not an identified contemporary broadcast. Carr supplied a theory and an invitation to send particulars. Stations had already received the warning.

The actual standards remain inconveniently specific. News distortion requires deliberate distortion of a factual report about a significant event; mistakes and opinions are not actionable. The hoax rule concerns knowingly false reports of crimes or catastrophes, foreseeable substantial harm and actual, immediate, direct substantial harm. A reasonable fiction disclaimer creates a presumption against foreseeability. An embarrassing polling result does not turn itself into a public-safety emergency by arriving before an election.

Nor does every outlet have the license Carr invoked. The FCC licenses individual broadcast stations, not networks as such, except where those entities also hold station licenses. Cable news falls outside its news-distortion jurisdiction. Finding fabricated data somewhere in the media is a starting point for reporting, not a substitute for identifying what a regulated station did.

Commissioner Anna Gomez called the warning a “way to spook stations into self-censoring.” That is her assessment, not a court finding. Thursday’s exchange did not establish a polling violation or announce a penalty. It did leave editors weighing a licensing warning whose author still needed to check for specific broadcasts.

Due diligence is sensible advice. Carr could make it considerably more persuasive by finishing his own before assigning it to everyone with something his agency can renew.