News Information and Media Site

October 1, 2020

By DYLAN BYERS in Los Angeles &

AHIZA GARCÍA-HODGES in San Francisco

Good morning. 🇺🇸 Chris Wallace is "sad" and "disappointed" with how Tuesday night's debate turned out. Awaiting his flight home from Cleveland, his boss Lachlan Murdoch offered him a glass of champagne. "I didn't feel much like celebrating," he told the Times.

• The Commission on Presidential Debates is now considering changes to the debate format after Tuesday's embarrassment, including one plan to mute candidates' microphones. Wallace says it wouldn't help, as the audio would be picked up by the other candidate's mic.

📺 71.3 million people watched the debate on television, per Nielsen. That's down from a record-high 84 million in 2016, but doesn't include the growing number of people who now watch these events on streaming services like Facebook and YouTube, or Twitch.

Join the Market: 🗞️ Newsletter | 🎙️ Podcast

Evan Spiegel | Getty

🗳️ Moving the Market

Exclu: Snap registers 1 million voters, a small boon for Biden

Snapchat has helped more than 1 million users register to vote, representatives for the company tell us. The feat is especially notable given who those users are: More than half are first-time voters, and more than 80 percent are under the age of 30.

• "There just simply isn't another tech or media platform that's been as mindful about reaching young voters with credible information and the tools to get involved in this election as Snapchat," Peter Hamby, the host of Snapchat's "Good Luck America," tells us.

The big picture: Most social media firms have taken aggressive steps to help register voters ahead of Nov. 3, with Facebook signing up 2.5 million so far. But Snap's recruitment of Gen Z and Millennial voters specifically could play a significant role in certain districts.

• If it does, it will likely be to the benefit of Joe Biden, as young voters overwhelmingly oppose President Trump and favor Democrats.

• Gen Z voters (18-23) and Millennial voters (24-39) both favor Biden over Trump by almost two-to-one, according to NBC News/Wall Street Journal surveys from the first eight months of this year.

Where it matters: Snapchat users are signing up big in historically red or battleground states. Snap says it saw more signups to register in Texas than any other state, with some of the largest additions coming from Texas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

• "Snap has a huge reach in the Sunbelt in particular ... where much of this election is playing out," said Hamby.

• While Texas is likely to go for Trump, the other four states the company mentioned are very much in play, according to the NBC News Battleground Map.

Will they vote? The majority of Snapchat users who register through the platform do go to the polls, Snap says. In the 2018 midterms, 57 percent of the 450,000-plus voters it helped register actually cast a ballot.

Mark Zuckerberg | Samuel Corum/Getty

🏛️ Big in the Beltway

Facebook takes action on Trump ads

Facebook took two separate actions on political advertising yesterday that help provide a sense of where the company intends to draw the line when it comes to ads influencing the election.

• First, Facebook took down ads from the Trump campaign that claimed that accepting refugees from abroad would increase the risk of exposure to the coronavirus pandemic.

• Then, Facebook said it would ban ads that seek to delegitimize the outcome of the election. That follows a previous move to ban ads that prematurely declare the election's winner.

The big picture: President Trump's divisive and misleading rhetoric is testing Facebook's longstanding commitment to open speech and its laissez faire approach to political advertising.

📰 Where we're at 📰

David Sanger, The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent, on page A1 of today's paper:

• "President Trump's angry insistence... that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud... [was] a stark reminder that the most direct threat to the electoral process now comes from the president of the United States himself."

Peter Thiel | Bloomberg/Getty

🌁 Big in the Bay

Palantir and Asana go public amid IPO boom

Peter Thiel and Dustin Moskovitz, two tech entrepreneurs with longstanding ties to Facebook, both took their companies public on Wednesday with direct listings on the New York Stock Exchange.

• Palantir, Thiel's data-mining company, finished the day up more than 31 percent.

• Asana, Moskovitz's work collaboration software, finished the day up more than 37 percent.

The big picture: "As the rest of the American economy has struggled with mass unemployment and the closing of businesses big and small, Wall Street has been welcoming to new public offerings," NYT's Cade Metz and Erin Griffith report.

• "The three months that ended with September were the busiest quarter for initial public offerings in 20 years, with 81 offerings set to raise $28.5 billion, according to Renaissance Capital."

Market Links

• Mark Zuckerberg further integrates his apps (NYT)

• Sheryl Sandberg addresses a corporate crisis (WSJ)

• Jack Dorsey removes 130 Iranian spam accounts (DB)

• David Remnick faces a New Yorker union fight (NYT)

• Matt Drudge has abandoned Trump in 2020 (NYT)

Jim VandeHei | PictureAlliance/Getty

🗞️ State of the News

Jim VandeHei says Axios is profitable

Axios is on target to make a profit this year "despite the economic turmoil stemming from the coronavirus that led to broad layoffs and pay cuts at many media outlets," sources familiar with its finances tell WSJ's Lukas Alpert.

• "The company... is on track to take in about $58 million in revenue ... up more than 30% compared with the year before ... largely because of the success of its sponsored-newsletter business."

What's next: "Axios is looking to expand. Early next year... it plans to establish two-person newsletter teams in several local markets, starting with Minneapolis; Denver; Tampa; and Des Moines."

The New York Times | Noam Galai/Getty

🗽 Moving Manhattan

The Times faces 'Caliphate' setback

"The New York Times is putting together a team of journalists to 're-report' its critically acclaimed podcast on the Islamic State after one of its central characters was arrested for allegedly faking his background in terrorism," The Daily Beast reports.

• "Caliphate, hosted by Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter Rukimini Callimachi, focused at length on... 'Abu Huzayfah,' a Canadian who said he traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State before eventually becoming disillusioned after taking part in brutal, public executions."

• "But last week, Canadian police upended the story when they arrested 25-year-old Shehroze Chaudhry and charged him with concocting a terrorist hoax."

• "Initially, both the Times and Callimachi stood by the podcast and its characterization of Huzayfah. ... But in a new statement on Wednesday, the Times said it is 'undertaking a fresh examination of his history and the way we presented him in our series.'"

The big picture: The decision to "re-report" the story is a late reversal for the Times. WaPo's Erik Wemple says Callimachi "has shown a reluctance to reckon with the scrutiny that comes with her standing as journalism's No. 1 terrorist correspondent."