Fake Pollster Duped the NYT for Four Months. Now the FCC Is Warning TV Stations.

A polling outfit called Wedgewood Polls spent four months feeding made-up election numbers to America's political press, and the press ate them up. The New York Times put 15 of its polls in its tracker. MS NOW put one on the air. Newsweek wrote them up. Then on Tuesday, caught red-handed by a polling-data site, Wedgewood admitted there was "no real data behind the vast majority of our releases," TheBlaze reported.

On Wednesday morning, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr told the TV networks the joyride is over. "During this election season, there has been 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 wrote on X. "Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations," Politico reported.

How a fake pollster got a seat at the table

Wedgewood showed up in June 2026 calling itself a nonpartisan online-panel polling firm. Its website ran on Google Sites and listed no staff names, no phone number and no address, and its X account was brand new, Newsweek reported. One early survey had Republican John Fleming leading Julia Letlow by 4 points in Louisiana's Senate primary. Letlow won by almost 14.

None of that kept it out of the big leagues. Decision Desk HQ has pulled 17 Wedgewood polls from its averages, and the firm's numbers had also run in polling databases kept by the Times, Nate Silver, VoteHub and FiftyPlusOne, per Newsweek. Earlier this month, MS NOW featured a Wedgewood poll giving Democrat Jocelyn Benson a 10-point lead over Trump-backed Republican John James in the Michigan governor's race, Mediaite reported. The Times now carries an editor's note saying all of Wedgewood's polls have been removed from its tracker.

Think of a restaurant inspector who hands out an A rating without ever walking into the kitchen. The rating looks official, the customers trust it, and nobody checks until somebody gets sick.

The numbers leaned one way

Look at what Wedgewood actually put out. Across 10 U.S. Senate polls from July to October, the firm showed the Democrat ahead in seven, including Jon Ossoff up 10 in Georgia, Abdul El-Sayed up 6 in Michigan, and Democrats leading in Maine, Ohio, Texas and Kansas, according to an archive of every Wedgewood release. Wedgewood says the only real survey of the bunch was its Nebraska poll.

That matters because polls do more than measure a race. They move money, volunteers and headlines. When President Trump said Monday, "Look, the polls are fake," he was talking about Kansas, where surveys show Republican Sen. Roger Marshall in a close race, PBS reported. Wedgewood was one of the outfits that had Democrat Adam Hamilton ahead there, 50 to 48.

'Far too easy'

Wedgewood says it was all an experiment. "We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?" it said on X. "The short answer: Far too easy," PBS reported.

The people who caught it don't buy the cover story. FiftyPlusOne had bought its own survey on the same platform Wedgewood claimed to use and found the respondent and transaction ID numbers in Wedgewood's raw data didn't match what real interviews produce. It gave the firm until midnight to answer. Instead, Wedgewood posted its confession and sent the researchers a two-word reply we won't print, FiftyPlusOne wrote. The firm had also been collecting donor money for "crowd-funded polls." And asked on X when it planned to come clean, Wedgewood answered: "We planned to publish 3 more polls and then reveal it after the midterms," in a reply on X. A wake-up call that only rings after the votes are counted isn't much of a wake-up call.

Even Democrats got burned. Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who quit her Senate primary race in July, said a Wedgewood poll in June showing her "plummeting into single digits" made donations dry up. "Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken," she wrote, PBS reported.

Second fake in two months

Wedgewood isn't the first. In August, a shop called Median Strategies admitted its polls were fake after the Los Angeles Times started asking questions. One of them showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass leading her challenger by double digits, and Bass touted it as proof her campaign was "gaining momentum," the AP reported. Its creator turned out to be a 21-year-old recent college graduate.

That is the pattern Carr is pointing at. "Many journalists and broadcasters have been 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," he wrote. He added that stations that want to give viewers "additional context and information about Polls they have covered" can now do so, TV Tech reported.

Predictably, the sole Democrat on the FCC, Commissioner Anna Gomez, said stations that air polling data "in good faith" shouldn't be punished, and a group of former FCC officials called Carr's warning censorship, Deadline reported. But nobody is asking networks to stop covering polls. The ask is simpler: know who made the numbers before you put them on screen.

The midterms are Nov. 3, less than two weeks away. Every network now has a reason to check the kitchen before it hands out the A.