FCC ‘looking at a lot of actions’ for networks airing fake polls and partisan coverage: Carr

Brendan Carr going on Fox News to say the FCC is "looking at a lot of actions" over polls he doesn't like should make everybody uncomfortable, including people who agree the polling industry has a credibility problem. Because the fix he's describing isn't a fix. It's a federal agency with license-renewal power signaling to broadcasters that their political coverage is under review. That's not a media critique. That's leverage.

And the polling complaint isn't even wrong on the merits. Plenty of pre-election surveys have been garbage for a decade, oversampling the wrong voters, missing the same demographic errors cycle after cycle, and networks running them uncritically as if they're settled science. Nobody serious defends that. But the answer to bad polling is better methodology, competing pollsters, and journalists getting embarrassed publicly when they're wrong. It is not a chairman appointed by the sitting president musing about "actions" against the outlets covering that president's opponents.

The tell here is Carr invoking Trump's view that "broadcast TV is completely different than other forms of distribution." That's the whole game. Cable and streaming get a pass, broadcast doesn't, because broadcast is the one the FCC actually licenses. Once you're picking which media gets regulatory scrutiny based on which platform the White House finds most annoying, you've stopped talking about fake polls and started talking about who gets to keep their license.

We'd have a lot more patience for this if it came from Congress, or from advertisers walking away, or from viewers just changing the channel. Those are real consequences for bad journalism. An FCC chairman hinting at "actions" on cable news is a different animal, and conservatives should be the first to say so, because we won't like it nearly as much the first time it's turned around on a broadcaster we actually trust.