Netflix chairman Reed Hastings has given $7 million to a super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’ run for president, according to a report by The Information on Tuesday.

The publication said that this was the largest donation Hastings has ever given in support of a single candidate.

Hastings was reportedly encouraged to donate by Reid Hoffman, Democratic donor and co-founder of LinkedIn.

Also Read: Netflix Co-Founder Reed Hastings Sticks His Neck Out on Biden Debate

While the Netflix co-founder and former CEO seemed initially cautious to endorse Harris, writing on X Sunday,  “Dem delegates need to pick a swing state winner." 

But after Harris won enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination Monday evening, Hastings quickly took to the app to congratulate her, stating that “now it is time to win.”

This comes just weeks after Hastings, among other media titans, publicly called for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race.

Earlier this month, Hastings even wrote an email to The New York Times saying, “Biden needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous.”

The coordinated Harris campaign reported Wednesday morning that it had raised more than $250 million in donations for the Democratic party between Sunday afternoon, when Biden withdrew from the race, and Tuesday evening.

No wonder legislators appear laser-focused on the power of social media these days. Use of social media giants Twitter and Facebook by politicians increased dramatically in 2020, according to a new Pew Research Center study of how Congress used both to engage with the public during and after the 2020 election, compared with 2016.

The analysis found that between Sept. 8 and Dec. 8, 2016, legislators had 207,009 posts on Facebook and Twitter combined, but that jumped to 315,818 such posts between Sept. 3 and Dec. 3, 2020.

Also Read: Pew: Sizable Portions of U.S. Use Social Media for News

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump was much on the minds, or at least in the feeds, of Democrats. In 2016, "Trump" was the second most common term used by Democrats and in 2020 it was the single most common word mentioned. By contrast, neither Hillary Clinton nor Joe Biden were among even the 10 most common terms for Republicans in 2016 and 2020, respectively.

Other takeaways from the analysis:

In terms of audience engagement, Democrats in 2016 received the largest increase when mentioning the possible election of Trump, while in 2020 Republicans received the biggest boost when saying that every legal vote should be counted or referencing Joe Biden's son, Hunter. For Democrats, “President-elect Trump” got the biggest engagement bump, followed by his strategist, “Steve Bannon.”

So-called link polarization is on the rise. The number of links to popular domains shared exclusively by members of one party or the other increased from 20 in 2016 to 31 in 2020.

Legislators are citing fewer outside links in their posts, driven by a sharp decline in Republicans linking to outside sources, down from 36% in 2016 to only 22% in 2020.

The Pew analysis is based on every Facebook post and tweet created by every voting member of the House and Senate, including official, campaign and personal accounts. That came to almost 166,000 Facebook posts from 698 members of Congress (a total of 1,408 Facebook accounts), and more than 357,000 tweets from 669 members of Congress (a total of 1,438 Twitter accounts).

Tegna reported higher fourth-quarter profits as it took in record political advertising sales and increased its subscription revenue despite a lengthy blackout battle with DirecTV.

Net income was $244.3 million, or $1.11 a share, compared to $84 million or 38 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 35% to $938 million, with record political advertising and an increase in subscription revenue. 

Fourth-quarter political ad revenue was $264 million, including $50 resulting from the Georgia Senate runoffs. The total was up 89% from the 2018 midterm elections.

Excluding political, fourth quarter revenue was up slightly from last year.

Also Read: Tegna Launching Twist Digital Multicast Network for Women

Subscription revenue was up 9% to $314 million. Tegna said subscription revenue would have been up 17% if it weren’t for the three-week blackout with AT&T’s DirecTV that ended in late December.

Tegna said its Premion over-the-top advertising business, finished the year with revenues of more than $145 million, up 40% from to 2019. Tegna said it expects similar growth in 2021.

For the first quarter of 2021, the company expects revenue to be up by mid-single digits  and operating expenses, excluding programming, to be up in the low single-digits.

In January, the company said that for the full year, it expects subscription revenue to be up in the mid- to high-teens and free cash flow to be 20.5% to 21.5% of revenue.

"Tegna  had an exceptional year of growth and innovation,” said CEO Dave Lougee. “The resiliency of our business model and continued execution of our five-pillar strategy positioned us for success regardless of the broader economic backdrop."

Lougee noted that Tegna renewed its largest network affiliation agreement in January with NBC and repriced approximately 35% of its subscribers last year and will reprice approximately 30% toward the end of this year.

"Looking to 2021, the full-year 2021 guidance we provided in early January and the incremental first quarter 2021 guidance we are providing today reflect our expectation for continued strength of our operations, visibility into our future cash flows, and continued commitment to prudent expense management,” Lougee said.

“We will continue to execute and innovate to drive advertising and marketing services revenues, and we expect to see continued improvement in underlying advertising trends following the impact of the global pandemic, “ he said.

Sinclair Broadcast Group reported higher fourth-quarter profits despite lower revenue.

Sinclair, a big owner of local stations and regional sports networks, said net income was $467 million, or $6.27 a share, compared to $44 million, or 47 cents, a year ago. 

Excluding $16 million in one-time costs related to transactions, COVID, litigation and regulation, operating income increased to $641 million from $322 million a year ago.

Revenue dropped 7% to $1.512 billion. Ad revenues were $554 million,  up from $456 million a year ago. Political ad sales hit $205 million compared to $23 million a year ago. 

Distribution revenue was $917 million, down from $1.1 billion.

Sinclair said that for the first quarter of 2021, it expects core ad revenue to be between $347 million and $362 million and for total revenue to be in the $1.462 billion to $1.485 billion range. EBITDA is forecast at $59 million to $80 million.  

Sinclair also said that it acquired the 73% interest it didn’t already own in ZypMedia, a demand-side platform specializing in local media campaigns. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Certainly 2020 will be a year not soon forgotten,” said CEO Chris Ripley. “The year was remarkable for its hardships, such as the pandemic that had a significant impact on people’s lives, the economy, and professional sports, and also its bright spots, such as the record political ad spending which helped offset weakness in core advertising caused by the pandemic.”

Ripley added that “2021 is shaping up to be another important year for Sinclair with the upcoming launch of a new, enhanced streaming app for our regional sports networks (RSNs), ushering in a new paradigm for how viewers can watch and interact with major local sporting events.”

The streaming app will add gamification of the viewing experience, making viewing more engaging for fans as they tune in to watch on the company’s RSNs, which are being rebranded under the Bally Sports name.

“We will work with Bally’s on exciting new programming and other initiatives to help drive growth,” Ripley said. “Along with other actions planned for the year, including the broader deployment of NextGen TV and the recent launch of our national news initiative, The National Desk, we are optimistic about the future of Sinclair.”

Nexstar Media Group reported a big jump in fourth-quarter profits driven by a big haul of political advertising in a presidential election year.

Net income rose to $364.2 million, or $7.97 per share, from $113.2 million, or $2.36 a share a year ago.

Revenue rose 25.1% to $362.9 million. Advertising revenue was up 37.3% to $771.8 million as the company collected $298.3 million in political spending, compared to $36.5 million a year ago. 

Also Read: NewsNation to Be New Name for Nexstar’s WGN America

Core advertising revenue was down 9.9% to $473.5 million as COVID-19 and the recession it caused continue to affect business.

Distribution fee revenue was up 18.4% to $528 million, despite a nearly month-long blackout with Dish in December.

Digital revenue dropped 12.5% to $65 million.

“Nexstar’s fourth quarter financial results conclude an outstanding year, as we set new records across every key financial performance metric, all of which exceeded consensus expectations,” said CEO Perry Sook.

“While robust demand from campaigns and issue advertisers this election season resulted in a reduction in inventory available for local and national advertisers in October, we continued to generate a sequential month-over-month improvement in core advertising revenue in November and December, which were the strongest months of the year since the pandemic began,” he said.

Haystack News, the ad supported streaming news service, said it is launching a new channel that focuses on the Georgia Senate runoff elections.

Haystack is also launching a channel that will cover the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and VP-elect Kamala Harris. Multiple Haystack channels will offer live coverage of the inauguration on Jan. 20.

The channels will feature local, national and global coverage drawn from more than 300 local broadcast stations, ABC News, The AP, Bloomberg, CBS News, Cheddar, Euronews and Newsy.

“Haystack News viewing  remains at record-high levels as we enter the new year, with politics driving engagement and news content consumption. Haystack’s dedicated channels for trending topics remain popular and give viewers a better understanding of all angles of an issue; micro to macro, local to global,” said Daniel Barreto, co-founder and CEO of Haystack TV. “Look for more new streaming channels every month as we continue on our journey to build televisions best platform for watching news.” 

Fuse Media is teaming up with Voto Latino Foundation for a town hall event focusing on the Georgia Senate run-off election.

Fuse Town Hall: The Georgia Run-off Election premieres Jan. 4 at 8 p.m. on Fuse.

The town hall will be moderated by Voto Latino Foundation president and CEO Maria Teresa Kumar. Panelists will include actors and Voto Latino board members Rosario Dawson and Wilmer Valderrama.

Other speakers include CHCI Public Policy Fellow Patricia Granada-Malaver and activist Jordan Gaeta.

Fuse and Voto Latino this year have worked together on Fuse’s "Be Change" initiative

Any early prognostications about what television might look like in 2020 were rendered irrelevant by March, as the deadly COVID-19 pandemic swept away any sense of normalcy with regard to viewers’ relationship with the screen. 

Once a passive form of entertainment and escape from life, the television, computer and mobile screen became our main connection to those around us as the pandemic forced many of us inside our homes for much of the year.

As many companies took to apps like Zoom to conduct business virtually, the pandemic shut down most TV show production for the spring and summer, leaving major holes in the programming lineups of networks and streaming services. Programmers were left to schedule marathons of older shows as well as movies to fill in for original series that had not finished their episode allotments.

Big Year for News Nets

Add to that the explosion of protests against social injustice around the country in response to the May killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers — as well as the buildup to the November presidential election — and viewers flocked to the cable news networks, led by Fox News Channel. Viewers tuned into Fox News, MSNBC and CNN in record numbers in November to follow the election and its aftermath, according to Nielsen.  

ALSO READ: The Longest Night

Viewers also turned to the web, where new streaming services from WarnerMedia (HBO Max) and NBCUniversal (Peacock) joined The Walt Disney Co. (Disney Plus) and industry veterans Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and CBS All Access in what industry observers have dubbed the “streaming wars.” Next month, Discovery will join the fray with its own direct-to-consumer service, Discovery Plus. 

Not all new streaming services survived the year. Quibi — led by movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman — folded shop Dec. 1, about eight months after its much-anticipated launch, due its inability to sign up enough subscribers to match lofty company expectations.

Day-and-Date Arrives

The pandemic also shut down most movie theaters, forcing some studios to turn to the streaming services to offer their major new releases at the same time as they hit the big screen. The unprecedented day-and-date scenario was cheered by viewers who can now see big ticket films like Disney’s Mulan, which premiered on Disney Plus on Sept. 4 after being pulled from its scheduled March theatrical release, as well as Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman 1984 and Pixar’s Soul (both set to debut this Christmas on HBO Max and Disney Plus, respectively.) While the move has been welcomed by viewers it’s been panned by theater owners who believe it will inevitably hurt ticket sales once cinemas are allowed to open again. 

ALSO READ: HBO Max Gets WarnerMedia’s Entire 2021 Film Slate Day and Date

Warner Bros. has upped the ante going into 2021 by announcing it will debut its full 17-movie theatrical lineup — including such movies as Matrix 4, a Suicide Squad sequel and Godzilla vs. Kong — on HBO Max a day-and-date basis.

“After considering all available options and the projected state of moviegoing throughout 2021, we came to the conclusion that this was the best way for WarnerMedia’s motion picture business to navigate the next 12 months,” WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said in a statement. “Our content is extremely valuable, unless it’s sitting on a shelf not being seen by anyone. We believe this approach serves our fans, supports exhibitors and filmmakers and enhances the HBO Max experience, creating value for all.” 

Sports Interrupted

No content category was challenged more by the pandemic than live sports programming. When sports leagues suspended their schedules in March, it first created a void, then play resumed amid unprecedented scheduling issues. The National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League completed their regular seasons in late summer and early fall, alongside Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer. 

When live professional sports events returned, so did viewers. Individual ratings for the Stanley Cup Finals, NBA Finals and the World Series fell short from the year-ago numbers, but industry observers said the cumulative audience for sports content this fall bodes well for the leagues when those events return to their traditional seasons.

ALSO READ: Sports Title Tilts Take Ratings Hit

“Overall, sports viewership has gone up in terms of the amount of hours people are watching sports, along with the digital consumption of sports content which went up substantially [in October],” said TV sports consultant Lee Berke. “Once everything gets back in a pattern, I’m not foreseeing much of an issue.”

The pandemic didn’t curtail interest in the pay-per-view event category as several 2020 boxing and mixed martial arts events drew buy figures above expectations. Two events, May’s UFC 251 and this past November’s Mike Tyson-Roy Jones Jr. boxing exhibition fight, reportedly drew more than 1 million PPV buys — the category’s gold standard — in the midst of the pandemic.

Look for both traditional PPV distributors like In Demand and streaming sports services such as ESPN Plus and FITE to offer sports fans a significant number of quality PPV sports events as fans ante up for content they want to see. All-time pay-per-view boxing champion Floyd Mayweather will test the appeal of an all-digital PPV event in February when he fights YouTube star Logan Paul. 

Gray Television said that its TV stations and digital services have run more than $400 million in political advertising so far this year.

Gray’s stations in Georgia have run $20 million worth of campaign advertising for the state’s two U.S. Senate runoff races since election day on Nov. 3. 

Gray said it expects political advertising will continue to grow through Jan 5, 2021, when the special Senate runoff elections are held.

Gray has Georgia stations in Savannah, Albany, Columbus and Thomasville.

Overall Gray owns station and digital properties in 94 markets. 

Fix the Court said the issues with electronic coverage of the courts have hardly been fixed.

Following technical issues with access to the Texas court decision Nov. 2 rejecting a Trump campaign attempt to invalidate drive-in-dropbox ballots, Fix the Court and media outlets, including the Radio Television Digital News Association, had sought assurances from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts that such issues were being addressed.

The head of the office responded this week that they were doing just that, though pointing out that there were rules against streaming audio from district courts on YouTube or other OTT platforms.

But Fix the Court slammed the office after more issues, this time with a Pennsylvania election-related court case, Trump v. Broockvar (the Trump campaign charges that its observers were kept too far away from the mail-in and absentee ballot-counting action to monitor it sufficiently).

The campaign is trying to block the state from certifying the election. Democrat Joe Biden is currently ahead by over 70,000 votes.

Fix the Court's Gabe Roth outlined the issues with the Pennsylvania case. "They set up a conference call line that could hold 4,000 people, but more than 4,000 people 'showed up,'" he said, "so they set up a second one. At some point about an hour ago [at about 5:10 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17], the call dropped altogether, and it took 20-30 minutes to get the audio working again. The audio quality was terrible, and it was difficult at times to hear attorneys from both sides, as well as the judge."

"Every federal appeals court, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has figured out how to livestream its hearings without technical failures," said Roth, "yet federal district courts, both today in Pennsylvania and two weeks ago in Texas, are plagued with massive difficulties at the very time the country's attention is upon them. This is completely unacceptable.

“Just yesterday, we were told by the courts' administrative arm that ensuring public access to proceedings 'is and remains a priority.' But today’s problems demonstrate the judiciary's lack of commitment to actual solutions, including the refusal to greenlight the use of YouTube or other platforms that can handle significant traffic."

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts said it is trying to provide more electronic access to court proceedings, including by advising courts they may want to pause proceedings if they have technical difficulties with providing online access to those proceedings.

That came in a response from office director James Duff to a letter to news outlets and Fix the Court, which had sought a definitive answer from the office on whether and how it plans to provide access to election-related legal challenges in district and federal appeals courts.

The request came last week when there were more Trump-backed lawsuits still extant.

In his response dated Nov. 16, Duff pointed out that in March, due to COVID-19, the Judicial Conference had approved the use of teleconference technology to provide the public and media outlets with live audio of civil proceedings, and provide guidance on how to implement that temporary exception to the general prohibition on the use of that technology, including "how to establish high-volume audio connectivity in an effort to maximize remote public access to the anticipated increase in election-related proceedings."

The letter from Fix the Court and others stemmed from technical issues with access to the Texas court decision Nov. 2 rejecting a Trump campaign attempt to invalidate drive-in-dropbox ballots. The phone line set up to provide access to that hearing malfunctioned and dropped everyone, said the outlets in a letter to Duff Tuesday (Nov. 3), after which only some outlets were allowed to get back on, and even then the audio quality was so bad, compounded by the fact that the reporters' lines were not muted, that it made it "almost impossible to understand."

To that point, Duff said: "If technical difficulties arise during a proceeding that significantly interfere with public access, courts have been advised that they may wish to consider pausing the proceeding until access can be restored."

But the office has also been working to obviate the need for such delays.

Duff said it has been working with courts to identify future potential technical difficulties, expanding its outreach along those lines including by asking courts to notify the office before high-demand proceedings and discuss options and assistance.

As to streaming court proceedings, he pointed out that many federal appeals courts currently provide audio, but that "judiciary policy prohibits audio streaming broadcasting of district court proceedings."

He did note that the conference has approved a pilot program to test livestreamed audio of civil proceedings in district courts, but that won't begin until next year.

After a grueling five days of ballot counting, the 2020 election finally ended on Saturday, Nov. 7. Around 11:25 a.m. ET, the Associated Press and TV networks declared that Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States, with Kamala Harris as his VP-elect, thanks to Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes which propelled him over the 270 threshold.

Inscape, Vizio’s data unit with insights from a panel of more than 16 million smart TVs, was tracking live viewership from Election Day onwards and shared some insights.

Related: Networks All In as Election Day Turned Into Election Days

Starting on Nov. 3, Fox News led the share of TVs tuned into election coverage until mid-day on Nov. 4, when CNN took over as No. 1 — and stayed that way. Some specific stats for the big three cable news networks:

• The share of TVs tuned into CNN (out of all active TVs that Inscape measured) remained consistently around 6.5% during the daytime, and only dipped below 4% after the Biden-Harris victory speeches ended.
• Fox News, which was edging close to an 11% share of TVs during election night, saw a steady viewership decrease as data showing Biden’s surge became the primary narrative.
• MSNBC remained steady with between 2-4% share of TVs.

Inscape also examined viewership crossover among the three cable news networks. Of those viewers who watched MSNBC Nov. 1-9, 64% also watched at least 10 minutes of CNN. For CNN viewers, 32% tuned into at least 10 minutes of Fox News.

Viewership When the Election Was Finally Called

The overall total share of TVs watching election-related news on Nov. 7 across broadcast and cable news networks jumped from 9.8% at 11:25 a.m. ET (right when the news hit that Biden won) to 14% in just 20 minutes. TV share peaked at 15% right around 12:31p.m. ET.

Here’s an hourly look at what happened specifically on cable news networks on Nov. 7. Unsurprisingly, viewership spiked between 11a.m. and noon ET, and then again after 8 p.m. as President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris delivered their speeches. During that point in the evening, MSNBC had a higher TV share than Fox News.

Here’s the minute-by-minute graph where you can see the jump, particularly with CNN, that occurred as networks announced Biden’s win. Viewership was fairly sustained for the next two hours except for on Fox News, when tune-in started to drop off before noon.

Where Were People Tuning in From?

On Election Day itself (Nov. 3), the top local area markets across the main broadcast networks and cable news channels included Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; St. Louis, Missouri; Kansas City, Missouri-Kansas; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Birmingham, Alabama. 

On Saturday, Nov. 7 when networks finally called the election for Biden, top local area markets across the main broadcast networks and cable news channels included West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce, Florida; Columbus, Ohio, Birmingham, Alabama; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

After the Speeches, Everyone Switched to NBC

As cable news viewership dwindled after the Biden-Harris celebration event, viewers increasingly turned over to NBC to catch what, for some, was sure to be a highly anticipated episode of Saturday Night Live. The show was delayed due to overtime in college football followed by a short NBC newscast, and NBC’s TV share only increased as people waited for SNL to come on.

Tegna reported higher third-quarter profits as record political ad spending and acquisitions boosted revenue.

Net income rose to $132 million, or 60 cents a share, up from $48.3 million, or 22 cents a share a year ago.

Revenue rose 34% to $738 million thanks to record political advertising revenue of $116 million.

Through election day, Tegna said it registered $395 million in political ad revenue, with more on the way in Georgia, where it owns stations in Atlanta and Macon. 

Third quarter subscription revenue rose 32% to $317 million because of rate increases and acquisitions. The company said about half of the households will be covered by agreements with new rates reached in last year’s fourth quarter.

Ad revenue was flat at $299 million because of acquisitions and growth at its Premion OTT advertising service. 

“Our record single quarter revenue performance in the third quarter reflects the strength and durability of our business model and ongoing focus of our Board and management to deliver on our long-term Strategy,” said CEO Dave Lougee.

“Despite the significant impact of COVID-19, advertising and marketing services has benefited from our sustained efforts to diversify our platforms and an expansion of our number of new advertisers, which is reflected in an aggregate market share increase across our portfolio. Advertising and marketing services has continued to show sequential monthly improvement since April,” Lougee said. “This performance demonstrates the sales transformation improvements we have actively implemented over the past several years, including bringing national sales in-house and creating one, holistic sales organization, which we call ‘One Team Tegna,’ to accelerate growth and better serve clients and agencies.”

The possible election victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in has worldwide implications, but for the cable industry, it all comes down to dollars and cents.

While a Democratic victory usually means greater scrutiny on the regulatory side — and a new Federal Communications Commission, which would oversee the rules — for businesses, Biden could seek to implement a corporate tax increase. Cable companies, long averse to tax payments, are mostly regular taxpayers now. And that could mean a Biden presidency could eat into profits.

See Also: 'Blue Ripple' Would Make Regulatory Waves | Hooray for Hollywood | Networks All In as Election Day Turned Into Election Days | The New FCC?

Bernstein media analyst Peter Supino did an analysis in mid-October of the potential impact of a Democratic victory on the cable business, determining that a 7% increase in the corporate tax rate, to 28% from 21%, would mean a 10% decline in profits for operators with mostly U.S.-based operations like Comcast, Charter Communications and Altice USA.

Comcast has been a regular federal taxpayer for years and Charter is expected to become one next year. Altice USA hasn’t had to pay federal taxes yet, according to Supino, but is expected to join its peers in paying Uncle Sam in 2021. AT&T is the wild card, the analyst wrote, “as they have had wildly different cash tax payments relative to expenses in the past.”

Still, the overall impact isn’t expected to be too great.

Shares in the top publicly traded distribution stocks were up even as the outcome of the election was awash in uncertainty early on Nov. 4. By late that afternoon, Charter was up 7.4%, Cable One had rose 7%, Altice USA was up 5.6% and Comcast was up 2.7%.

“Our coverage companies are well-practiced in tax optimization strategies, so we expect certain company cash flows to be impacted less than accounting earnings,” Supino wrote, noting that after the 2016 election, companies with higher proportions of U.S. income outperformed others for a period of weeks. He didn’t expect as dramatic a decline in a Biden administration. 

Other potential tax changes — an alternative minimum tax of 15% on companies with accounting profits of $100 million or higher, raising the tax rate on foreign income of U.S. companies to 21% and imposing a 10% surtax on companies that post jobs overseas to sell goods to Americans  (which will mainly apply to companies with call centers) — could all have an impact. 

Supino noted that although Comcast and AT&T have the biggest international revenue streams, they are small enough that the tax impact will be insignificant. 

“Because a Biden victory in 2020 would be less surprising than was the Trump victory in 2016, and because the proposed change in corporate tax rates is smaller than was the Trump proposal, we believe that the underperformance of the same stocks after a potential Democratic victory in 2020 would be less sharp,” Supino wrote.

On the programming side, MoffettNathanson media analyst Michael Nathanson wrote that the biggest threat of a Biden presidency is to Fox Corp., parent of Fox News Channel, which stands to lose the most if Trump starts his own rival news network. In a research note, Nathanson estimated that a Trump Network could poach about 20% of FNC’s news audience and capture 10% of the total news market. That could cost Fox News around $225 million in lost ad revenue and about $200 million in EBITDA.

“Given the singular financial importance of Fox News to Fox Corp., the fear of a new rival competing with Fox News has created a new, bearish narrative that appears to be restraining Fox’s equity momentum,” Nathanson wrote. 

When all the votes are counted, it is looking increasingly likely that the Democrats will have recaptured the White House by a donkey’s whisker. But it was unclear, though a long shot, if that blue ripple would flip the Senate. If so, that would give regulatory-minded congressional Democrats the ability to put an end to the legal wrangling over a neutral internet, impose tougher new privacy laws or pass their version of social media regulation. 

There were razor-thin races still being contested, with more potential twists possible at press time. But on the assumption that the late, urban-centric counties secured a victory for former Vice President Joe Biden that can’t be overturned by President Donald Trump’s lawyers or reversed through recounts — and if the FCC does shift to Democratic leadership — then cable, broadband and broadcast players face the potential return of a number of regulations, including network neutrality rules and an end to the FCC’s push to deregulate broadcast ownership.

See Also: Hooray for Hollywood | Networks All In as Election Day Turned Into Election Days | The New FCC? | Biden Win Would Have Minor Impact on Cable Profits

The National Association of Broadcasters has hit its members up for more money, in part pointing to the possible need to make its deregulatory pitch to a re-regulatory D.C.

With Republicans holding onto the Senate, there would be no legislation reclassifying internet access as a Title I telecommunications service subject to mandatory access and potentially rate regulation. But a Democratic FCC would almost certainly do the reclassifying and restore rules against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization, which would be challenged in court again and continue the years-long careening from regulation to deregulation of internet access.

The FCC under a Democratic chair would likely conclude that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, a 180-degree turn from the Republican-led FCC’s conclusion that progress toward deployment met that definition. 

If the FCC says deployment is not up to snuff, the law allows it to regulate to make it so. That effort could include rate regulation because, unlike Republicans, the Democrats argue that price is an impediment to reasonable broadband rollout. Democrats could also raise the speed threshold for the definition of broadband availability, which could reduce the number of households credited with broadband availability.

On the broadcast side, the FCC has been defending its broadcast ownership deregulation in the wake of a court remand from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded the FCC had not sufficiently taken into account the impact of deregulation on diversity.

Ownership Rules Likely Stay

A Democratic FCC would almost certainly view the broadcast landscape differently. The Democrats have long argued that loosening local ownership rules simply helps mega-groups like Sinclair Broadcast Group get larger, to the detriment of localism and diversity.

But one veteran broadcast executive said that if a chairman Jessica Rosenworcel-led FCC, for example, does try to re-regulate, exhibit A against that move should be the recent report from Senate Commerce Committee Democrats that found online news has “decimated” broadcast TV news revenues in the age of digital, in part due to “unfair and abusive practices by tech platforms.” 

Look for a Democratic FCC majority, which would likely be led by a woman and include at least one minority member, to launch a serious inquiry into broadcast diversity — particularly considering the current reckoning over racial inequalities that are definitely evident in the makeup of broadcast ownership.

As the Rev. Jesse Jackson, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association president and CEO Michael Powell and many others have pointed out, minorities and women were not allowed in line when broadcast licenses were handed out, or in the room when big media deals were struck and the spoils divided.

The current FCC has shown no interest in launching a larger diversity inquiry in connection with the court’s directive to explicitly address the issue in any broadcast deregulation. Chairman Ajit Pai has dismissed the court remand as essentially an impediment to his diversity efforts, which included creating an incubator program that the court threw out and reconstituting the FCC’s diversity advisory committee.

According to the FCC’s latest biennial report on broadcast station ownership, released earlier this year, members of racial minority groups as of 2017 racial minorities collectively owned 26 commercial full-power TV's, or only 1.9% of the total, down from 36 (2.6%) in 2015.

Section 130 Still Looms

One issue that won’t going away no matter which party wins the Senate or White House is the debate over what to do about Section 230, the provision in the Communications Decency Act that has allowed social media to flourish without the threat of civil suits over third party content on their sites.

With an incoming Democratic administration, Pai would be unlikely to follow through with his plans on an order responding to the president’s call for social media regulation. Usually, lame-duck chairmen stand down from controversial items at the behest of congressional leadership from the other party. Pai does not have to comply, but a new FCC could simply reverse an 11th-hour Section 230 order.

The concerns about the size and power of Big Tech run across party lines, though. There will likely be some changes to Section 230, said a former top FCC official speaking not for attribution. But there probably won’t be anything going out the door on a matter as controversial as that before a change in administrations. 

Biden has been a critic of Section 230’s broad immunity, as have congressional Democrats. But while Republicans were using the issue as a cudgel on Silicon Valley giants they say were systematically censoring conservative speech, Democrats say that charge is bogus and was, at least in part, a way to try and pressure Twitter and Facebook not to flag the president’s tweets before the election. Democrats are focused on curtailing hate speech and election meddling via changes to Section 230.

“I definitely see something happening on Section 230, though I think it is constitutionally dicey to find some way to raise and lower the liability issue based on curation,” Robert McDowell, a Republican FCC commissioner during the Bush and Obama administrations and now co-chair of Cooley’s global communications practice group, said. “I am not sure how that survives constitutional muster when it comes to political speech.”

Privacy Laws Still Hard

Had Democrats won the Senate, privacy legislation might have finally seen the light of day after lots of bipartisan talk and no action. Now, presumably, not so much, though McDowell suggests that, while politically popular, it would still have been hard even in an all-Democratic town, where it becomes essentially an intramural fight. He pointed to the large California delegation that would want something at least as strong as the state’s privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act. “It is difficult even with the most apolitical policymakers,” McDowell said. “But there is the popular sentiment that something amiss in the tech world,” McDowell said. 

Industry players were not rooting for a re-regulatory pendulum swing in this election. But even though he was an avowed deregulator-in-chief in some ways, Trump’s inconsistency made it hard to predict where he would come down on issues, and he drew flak from various communications quarters.

NCTA recently took strong issue with Trump’s executive order on diversity training, a directive that no government contractor would get business with his administration if their diversity training included efforts to address systemic racism. The Biden administration would almost certainly reverse that order ASAP. The president’s targeting of cable news networks for scorn, as well as his threats to break up Comcast NBCUniversal and try to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger, have put him at odds with an industry that would have otherwise been in his deregulatory corner.

The NAB pushed back hard on Trump’s attacks on the news media, while the Consumer Technology Association was highly critical of his stands on immigration and tariffs, which respectively threatened a high tech workforce and raised the cost of tech products.

If Biden is the president, look for Trump tariffs to be reviewed/rescinded and for a better working/sparring relationship with the mainstream media.

With all the madness surrounding 2020, it was only fitting that Election Day would end without a winner decided. The network news-gatherers knew they were in for a long night, and in terms of drama, anxiety and, yes, length, Election Day did not disappoint. 

“This has been unlike any election we’ve covered,” said Norah O’Donnell, CBS Evening News anchor, after CBS coverage began at 7 p.m. ET. 

See Also: 'Blue Ripple' Would Make Regulatory Waves | Hooray for Hollywood | The New FCC? | Biden Win Would Have Minor Impact on Cable Profits

The networks were happy to show off their new bells and whistles, be it augmented reality or a new wrinkle to the touch-screen Magic Wall. “Let’s show off our toys here!” said Chuck Todd, NBC News political director, as he clicked to display early, absentee and Election Day voters. 

NBC’s screen hollered “Road to 270.” Hallie Jackson, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, said, “There’s a lot of eyeballs on Pennsylvania tonight.”

Her counterpart at ABC, Jonathan Karl, also cited the Keystone State early in the coverage. “Pennsylvania, be prepared to be patient,” he said. 

On the ABC set, Chris Christie said the early signs “look very good for the president’s prospects in Florida.”

On CNN moments later, John King, chief national correspondent, was focused on Florida as he tweaked the Magic Wall, drilling down on the Sunshine State’s individual counties. “Welcome to the roller coaster that is Florida,” he said.

Steve Kornacki, NBC News national political correspondent, worked the
Magic Wall on MSNBC, diving deep on Ohio counties to see how voting compared to four years ago. 

Todd had other toys to show off on NBC, clicking to display 2016, 2012 and 2008 vote tallies in the Florida counties. “This is the toy I love the best,”
he said.

At 8 p.m. the Fox broadcast network signed on, with anchors Trace Gallagher and Sandra Smith on the desk. On Fox News Channel, Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace noted President Trump was ahead in the popular vote around 8:30. “In the end, some people feel more comfortable with Donald Trump as their leader,” he said. 

Speaking with Broadcasting+Cable before Election Day, CBS News president Susan Zirinsky put the 2020 contest in context. “The election really will determine a very critical period in our nation’s history,” she said. “The impact of what is happening in this election — everything is at stake.

O’Donnell mentioned the “huge, unprecedented turnout” by voters. Added John Dickerson, CBS political analyst, “Democracy is working really, really well.” 

At 10 p.m., CNN teased a Key Race Alert, only to say that several states, including Iowa, Nevada, Utah and Montana, were too early to call.

At 10:30, John King said “there are no surprises on the map thus far.” He cracked, “If Joe Biden can rebuild the Blue Wall, forgive me, Donald Trump will pay for it.”

Ten minutes later, O’Donnell suggested viewers brew a pot of coffee, as the grand conclusion was not coming soon. Ed O’Keefe, CBS News political correspondent, agreed. “Election Days,” he quipped. 

Just before 11 p.m. ET, CNN had Biden at 192 electoral votes and Trump at 108. “It’s easy for a Democrat to get to 192,” said King, but not so much to 270. 

As the night ended it seemed clear it would take days for either candidate to get to 270, at least officially. “We’re just getting started,” King said. “We are just getting started."

Reaction began to pour in Saturday after the cable and broadcast news nets reported that former senator and Vice President Joe Biden had won enough votes to become the 46th President of the United States and Sen. Kamala Harris to be the first woman and first person of color to be Vice President-elect.

Among the first was from another former senator, Gordon Smith, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, who said it was time to acknowledge Biden has been elected President.

“It has been clear for days now that Joe Biden has been on track to win the popular vote in his run for the presidency. It is decisive that today he has surpassed the threshold of 270 electoral college votes. NAB congratulates Joe Biden on becoming president-elect of the United States of America...With due respect to President Trump’s rights to judicial review of election results, it is time to acknowledge the election of Joe Biden and to allow him the chance to bind our nation back together.” 

Smith that binding potential from personal experience. 

"I was privileged to serve beside President-elect Joe Biden during my two terms as a Republican Senator from Oregon," said Smith. "I know Joe. I know his patriotic love for his country and of his good heart for all his countrymen. Working together on the Foreign Relations Committee, we routinely bridged the partisan divide to achieve important legislative accomplishments. And, during a time of personal tragedy for my family, when we lost our son Garrett, Joe was a source of support and solace. Because he too knew the pain of losing a child, he gave to me a steady, brotherly shoulder to lean on. Joe is a healer, the consoler-in-chief our nation has elected. 

"Congratulations to President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris on your victory," tweeted Michael Powell, "NCTA-The Internet & Television Association and the U.S. cable industry look forward to working with you and your administration."

“CCIA congratulates President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris on their historic election and look forward to working with their Administration and the new Congress on tech policy issues that can boost innovation, create jobs, and bolster the U.S. economy," said said Computer & Communications Industry Association President Matt Schruers. "In these unprecedented times, policies like strengthening commerce and relations with our trading partners, and encouraging broadband access to overcome the digital divide, can create economic opportunity as our nation fights the pandemic and its consequences together." 

“The Motion Picture Association congratulates President-elect Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, and the incoming 117th Congress on their electoral victories," said Motion Picture Association Chairman Charles Rivkin. "We look forward to working with them on a wide range of important issues, including measures that facilitate return to work for an industry that supports 2.5 million American jobs, helps finance 280,000 businesses in cities and small towns across the country, and pays over $181 billion in wages annually. We commend everyone who worked this year to ensure fair elections and preserve our nation’s legitimate democratic processes.”

Free Press was already driving some policy stakes in the ground.

"We will push the new administration, Congress and the FCC to quickly restore Title II authority, strengthen the rules protecting the free and open internet, and ensure the agency can take action to get broadband to everyone," said Free Press. "A clear commitment to Net Neutrality and strong FCC authority to protect everyone’s broadband rights is a prerequisite for anyone picked to run the FCC."

“We congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory," said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association. “Our vibrant technology sector is the envy of the world. We look forward to working with President-elect Biden and his administration, as well as the new Congress to advance priorities that promote innovation and competition in America. Specifically, we look forward to recalibrating our trade policies, promoting free online speech by preserving Section 230 protections and ensuring all Americans have the access and benefits of high-speed broadband. We are also committed to attracting the best and brightest to work in America through meaningful immigration reform and by training the American workforce on the skills needed to compete in the tech economy. 

“We look forward to the peaceful transition of power which both parties have followed and respected and sets us apart from many other countries.” 

 “The tech industry congratulates President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris on their historic election," said ITI President Jason Oxman. "We understand revitalizing and growing the U.S. economy will be a top focus as the world continues to grapple with COVID-19 and the economic fallout from the pandemic. Our industry can be a partner on this all-important effort, as well as on policies that maintain America’s global leadership and foster greater opportunity for American families across all communities. From closing the digital divide to investing in research and development to a renewed collaboration with allies to achieve U.S. trade, economic, and national security objectives, our industry is committed to working constructively with the Biden-Harris Administration to ensure that the United States adopts policies that support the well-being of all Americans. At the same time, America’s proud tradition of a peaceful transition of power must continue..."

“We congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris on their victory, and we look forward to working with the President-elect, his Administration and the Congress to ensure broadband connections for all Americans," ACA Connects President Matt Polka. 

 “This pandemic has made the powerful case that connectivity is a priority for every family and business. We look forward to working with everyone in this new Administration to build upon the Herculean efforts our Members have made as they continue to serve their customers and communities during the ongoing pandemic," said Polka. "Our Members, who serve rural and hard-to-reach areas across the nation, will be key allies in the effort to complete the task of broadband everywhere. Our Members have and will continue to invest, innovate and deploy broadband to the most remote places in America."

“I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris on their historic victory," said TechNet President and CEO Linda Moore. "I especially want to congratulate Vice President-elect Harris as the first woman to hold this role in our nation's 244-year history.... At TechNet, our focus remains on advancing policies that enable inclusive job growth, empower the workforce of tomorrow, ensure our nation’s global competitiveness, and promote digital trust...."

“The results of this election are clear: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ victory is possible because women, particularly Black women, across the nation made their voices heard," said Shaunna Thomas, executive director of UltraViolet. "Throughout American history, Black women and women of color have led the charge against injustice and sparked social change. Today, they changed the course of our nation."

"The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) congratulates President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris on their historic victory in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, which saw record voter turnout across the country and pivotal turnout from Native voters in the decisive states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona, among others," said NCAI, which has been pushing for closing the broadband divide on Tribal lands. "NCAI looks forward to working closely with the Biden-Harris transition team in the coming weeks to ensure that Indian Country’s key priorities are addressed, and with the Biden-Harris Administration over the next four years to strengthen the government-to-government relationship and the federal government’s fulfillment of its trust and treaty obligations to tribal nations."

As former Vice President Joe Biden's lead in Pennsylvania appeared to be insurmountable, and the news nets called the presidential race in his favor, President Donald Trump refused to join the crowds, saying Biden was posing as the winner and the race was not yet done. 

That came in a statement Saturday (Nov. 7) from his campaign but attributed to Trump:

The full statement is below:

“We all know why Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed. The simple fact is this election is far from over. Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor. In Pennsylvania, for example, our legal observers were not permitted meaningful access to watch the counting process. Legal votes decide who is president, not the news media.

“Beginning Monday, our campaign will start prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld and the rightful winner is seated. The American People are entitled to an honest election: that means counting all legal ballots, and not counting any illegal ballots. This is the only way to ensure the public has full confidence in our election. It remains shocking that the Biden campaign refuses to agree with this basic principle and wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters. Only a party engaged in wrongdoing would unlawfully keep observers out of the count room – and then fight in court to block their access.  

“So what is Biden hiding? I will not rest until the American People have the honest vote count they deserve and that Democracy demands.”

- President Donald J. Trump"

Most cable news nets and broadcast news operations are projecting that Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been elected the 46th president, defeating incumbent Republican Donald Trump. 

That is because they are predicting Biden has an insurmountable lead in Pennsylvania, which would push him past the 270 electoral college votes needed to win. Votes are still being counted in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia with Biden leading in those states, though Trump is making inroads in Arizona.

That call, four days in the making, came at 11:24 a.m. ET Saturday (Nov. 7). Those nets have begun referring to Biden as president-elect.

Kamala Harris, a daughter of immigrants, will be the first woman and person of color to be Vice President. 

MSNBC and CNBC also called it for "president-elect" Biden at about the same time.

Fox initially did not call the race. "We are not ready to make that call," said Neil Cavuto at 11:32 a.m. But within a few minutes the network said it was projecting that "Biden wins PA and NV and has electoral votes to win presidency."  By early afternoon, Fox's graphic was "Joe Biden Elected 46th President."

Trump has pledged to keep challenging the vote via a number of legal sorties.

On CNN, commentator Rick Santorum said he and his Republican colleagues were not ready to concede the election just yet.

Biden will be the oldest President ever sworn in at 78 when he takes the oath of office.

In the Saturday morning hours before the call, Trump was tweeting his allegations of fraud and asserting: "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!"

Twitter was flagging most of those tweets, though it allowed that all-caps claim to stand, though pointing out that the race may not have been called when the President's own call was tweeted. 

The Trump campaign issued a statement that it was not conceding, that Biden should not be called the president-elect, and that it would see everyone in court Monday.

The counting continues and the election has yet to be called, but former Vice President Joe Biden is now leading in enough states (306 electoral votes with only 270 needed) to be elected President.

The Georgia race flipped early Friday morning (Nov. 6) and Pennsylvania turned blue on electronic maps several hours later. Pennsylvania by itself is enough to put him over the top.

Related: Trump Challenges Integrity of Election

While the President continues to claim voter fraud, including in Pennsylvania, and file suits against various counts, Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey, speaking on CBS This Morning, said he was not aware of any significant fraud or wrongdoing and that the President was making "very very serious' allegations "without any evidence to support it."

Also on CBS This Morning, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a former presidential candidate herself and a potential Biden cabinet member, said: "Donald Trump sadly is trying to take our democracy down with him into the sewer, despite the fact that there is no evidence of fraud. Let the votes be counted."

Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger tweeted Friday: "We want every vote counted, yes every legal vote (of course). But, if you have legit concerns about fraud present EVIDENCE and take it to court. STOP Spreading debunked misinformation... This is getting insane."

Longtime Republican Election Lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg said on CNN that there is no evidence to claim the election was rigged or that there was widespread fraud.

In one of Trump's Friday morning tweets flagged by the social media site, the President said the Supreme Court would need to weigh in, evoking memories of the court's pivotal role in the 2000 election, though that had to do with recounts rather than allegations of counting/ballot fraud.

Fox News was reporting that the Trump campaign has just issued a statement to the effect that "this is not over."

There was also a graphic on the Trump campaign site labeled Election Defense Fund and seeking money with the promise of a 1,000% match.

Fox's Chris Wallace said there was as yet not evidence of the kind of widespread fraud that would overturn an election. Wallace suggested that on Fox News Sunday he would probably be talking both about a President-elect Biden and the court challenges to that designation.

President Trump went to the White House press room Thursday evening (Nov. 5) to claim the ballot-counting was a fraud and said he would be challenging results, perhaps all the way up to the Supreme Court.

By Friday morning, the campaign Web site was trying to raise a defense fund war chest for those legal challenges.

The President said: "If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us."

Related: Twitter Flags More Trump Election Tweets

Trump blamed interference from "big money, big media and big Tech" for what he has said was a fraudulent election filled with irregularities regarding the mail-in ballots he has long said were a problem and are now being counted with the majority going to Joe Biden.

Trump said there had been a lot of "shenanigans" and that the courts would likely have to resolve the election.

He said the election officials overseeing ballot counting in Pennsylvania and other key states were all part of "a corrupt Democrat machine..."

But he also celebrated the fact that no incumbent Republican House member lost their seat and Republicans looked like they might be holding on to the Senate, apparently having no issues with the election down ballot.

Fox News Channel had the biggest audience on election night with 11.6 million households, according to Samba TV, which has also produced interesting data on which states were tuned in and how they voted.

According to Samba, Fox News viewership over-indexed in the states that were called for President Trump on election night and under-indexed in states where former VP Joe Biden was projected as the winner. 

On average, Fox viewership was 8.7% higher than average in the states that turned red and 8.7% lower in blue states.

In the states that were too early or too close to call, Fox News Channel viewing over-indexed by 7.2%.

Of the states 23 states that went for Trump, 17 over-indexed for Fox. Red states that under-indexed for Fox were Alaska, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, Texas and Utah.

Of the blue states (and the District of Columbia), 16 under-indexed for Fox and five over-indexed: Colorado, Connecticut, New Hampshire and New Jersey.

Michigan was the only state undecided on election night that under-indexed for Fox. It later swung to Biden.

Alabama was the state that over-indexed the most for Fox News, 31% above average levels. The District of Columbia under-indexed the most for Fox News and over-indexed the most for MSNBC.

According to Samba TV, CNN was second in households with 10.7 million. It was followed by NBC with 8.2 million households, ABC with 7.9 million households, CBS with 6.3 million households and MSNBC with 5.1 million households.

Samba said the highest income households over-indexed on PBS, MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, while lower-income households over-indexed on the broadcast networks.

Younger households also over-indexed on the broadcast networks.

As the polls closed, 56.9 million people tuned in during primetime to watch coverage of the Presidential election Tuesday night, according to Nielsen.

The total was down 20% from four years ago when 71.4 million watched as Donald Trump pulled off a surprising victory. 

Election night coverage across 21 networks drew a 31.2 household rating, down from a 40 rating in 2016. 

There was a huge drop in viewing among 18- to 34-year-olds. The Joe Biden-Donald Trump countdown drew 7.7 million viewers in the younger demo, down from 13.3 million four years ago.

Fox News Channel racked up the most total viewers on the night, with 13.6 million. CNN was next with 9.1 million, followed by MSNBC with 7.3 million, ABC with 6.1 million, NBC with 5.6 million, CBS with 4.3 million and Fox with 3.4 million.

Tech association ITI is urging that all votes be counted in the hotly contested 2020 election.

"Tuesday’s election continues a two-century-old tradition of the United States’ democratic process allowing Americans to choose their leaders," said ITI President Jason Oxman.

President Trump's campaign has tried to stop vote-counting in some states while Biden has urged patience and for all votes to be counted.

"The historic voter turnout reflects the widespread civic engagement efforts that took place across the country, encouraging millions of Americans to exercise their right to vote," he said. "As the votes are counted, we continue to urge all Americans to support America’s long-standing and important tradition of peaceful and fair elections."

ITI said it was ready to work with whichever Administration emerges on tech issues, but it has been critical of President Trump over the President's pushback on some diversity training, its restrictions on immigration, his executive order on regulating social media, and tarriffs.

Electronic and print news outlets have joined with Fix the Court to ask James Duff, director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and the executives running the 13 federal circuits to ensure there is live, unfettered public access to any court hearing and judges' ruling related to the election.

That stems from technical issues with the Texas court decision Monday (Nov. 2) rejecting a Trump campaign attempt to invalidate drive-in-dropbox ballots. The phone line set up to provide access to that hearing malfunctioned and dropped everyone, said the outlets in a letter to Duff Tuesday (Nov. 3), after which only some outlets were allowed to get back on, and even then the audio quality was so bad, compounded by the fact that the reporters' lines were not muted, that it made it "almost impossible to understand."

They offered some suggestions to avoid a repeat of those issues for the existing and expected legal challenges surrounding the election. "There are dozens of election lawsuits making their way through district and appeals courts at this very moment, and the American people have a keen interest in how these cases are being argued and how they are being decided," they told Duff.

1. Allow district courts to use YouTube channels, which most circuits have created for audio appeals during the pandemic.

2. Work with the local media outlets to create a pool feed of the arguments.

3. Tweet, send a press release, and or post on the court home page if there are delays and technical issues

Joining in the letter were the Radio Television Digital News Association, the National Press Photographers Association, the News Media Alliance, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

While some viewers, tired of the political spots and endless campaign coverage on cable, may seek out entertainment programming on Election Day, Susan Zirinsky, CBS News president, expects news viewership the eve of Nov. 3 to be through the roof. During what she calls our “year of living dangerously,” most every American has been affected by COVID, the economic crash or the social unrest around the country. Today marks their opportunity to weigh in on who to lead them to happier and healthier times. 

“These are life-and-death circumstances that are surrounding this election,” said Zirinsky. 

ABC, CBS and NBC go live at 7 p.m. ET and Fox at 8 p.m. ET. Cable news starts earlier. 

Beginning at CBS News as a college student in the network’s Washington bureau before the Watergate scandal undid President Nixon, Zirinsky has covered a bunch of election days across her career. What’s different about 2020’s? 

“Everything!” she said. “It’s a dynamically different election.”

CBS News has a new set at ViacomCBS headquarters at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan, and has its newsroom further uptown at the CBS Broadcast Center at 57th Street. Zirinsky said “a fair amount” of staffers will be on site, with COVID precautions carefully carried out. 

CBS News will label state races with a likely, a leaning or a toss-up before any projection on the winner arrives. Zirinsky mentioned transparency as a primary theme with viewers throughout the night. “We are telling you what’s happening at this minute,” she said. “We want to be careful, but not timid.”

CBS News has polled in all 50 states, and will have surveyed 100,000 voters for the CBS News Battleground Tracker when Election Day coverage begins. Both are a first for CBS News. “We have the strongest database to make the most accurate assessments,” said Zirinsky. 

Election Day is an event news gatherers live for, and all the wild cards in the 2020 election--an incumbent who has said he’d refuse to accept a peaceful transition if he loses, early and remote voting and a virus continuing to waylay much of America--increase the anticipation for newsroom denizens even more. “The election really will determine a very critical period in our nation’s history,” said Zirinsky. “The impact of what is happening in this election--everything is at stake.

CBS News will have Norah O’Donnell, anchor of CBS Evening News; Gayle King, co-host of CBS This Morning; Margaret Brennan, Face the Nation moderator; John Dickerson, senior political analyst, and correspondents Ed O’Keefe and Major Garrett, among others. 

On ABC, chief anchor George Stephanopoulos leads coverage in New York, alongside World News Tonight anchor David Muir, ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis and a correspondents crew that includes chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl.  

NBC will have NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, Meet the Press moderator and NBC News political director Chuck Todd and chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, among others. 

Cable news, including Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, are loaded for bear as well. Fox News starts at 6 p.m. in New York, with chief political anchor and Special Report’s Bret Baier and The Story anchor and executive editor Martha MacCallum hosting, and Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, senior political analyst Brit Hume, The Daily Briefing anchor Dana Perino and political analyst Juan Williams on as well. 

For WNYW New York, Dari Alexander and Steve Lacy anchor at 5 and 10 p.m., and Lori Stokes at 6 p.m. The station will do news cut-ins during Fox Democracy 2020 prime coverage. 

CNN has Dana Bash, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Abby Phillip and Jake Tapper in Washington. Election Night in America coverage begins at 4 p.m. 

On MSNBC, it’s Nicolle Wallace at 4 p.m. ET, Chris Hayes at 5 and Rachel Maddow, Brian Williams, Joy Reid and Wallace anchoring starting at 6 p.m. 

Zirinsky said the CBS crew is ready to roll. “We feel the responsibility to get it right,” she said. 

Fox Corp. said it expects to generate nearly $300 million in political advertising during the second half of 2020.

Speaking on the company’s first quarter earnings call with analysts Tuesday, Fox CFO Steve Tomsic said that so Far this quarter, the company has seen just under $100 million in political advertising.

Related: News Network Ad Prices Jump Election Night

Of that about 70% went to the Fox’s local TV stations with most of the rest airing nationally on Fox News and Fox Sports.

Both parties have taken the unusual step of buying ads in the World Series and during NFL games.

“When we look at it across the first half, from July 1st through to day, without wanting to steal the thunder of the next earnings call, we’ll push close to $400 million dollars of political ad revenues for the full six months, of which just north of $200 million will be local,” Tomsic said. “So its been an enormous quarter and a half for us.”

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch added that the growth of national political political advertising has been unique this election cycle.

“Political advertising has been almost entirely local and the growth in national political advertising, particularly on Fox News, but also importantly in sports, has been a a new and I think, very positive development.”

Murdoch added that political spending is added to the strength of the overall advertising market.

“What the robustness of the political market has really done is drive our scatter price up as advertisers have scrambled to find time across local stations, across sports, across news and across entertainment.”

Fox made a “strategic decision to hold back a little bit more time than we normally would in our upfront negotiations negotiations--about 5% more time,” he said. “That bet is paying off handsomely.”

With millions of Americans expected to tune in to see who will be president for the next four years, news networks are getting big bucks for commercials during their election night coverage.

According to preliminary numbers from SQAD MediaCosts: National Data, CNN is getting $231,000 per 30-second spot and MSNBC is getting $125,000. SQAD did not have data on how much Fox News was getting for its commercials.

That's nearly triple what ads cost during when votes were counted in 2016. Four years ago election night commercials on CNN cost $92,687, spots on MSNBC were $52,496 and ads on Fox News fetched $82,319.

The rates are much higher than prime time in a non-election year. For 2017, SQAD reports that the average for a prime time spot on the first Tuesday in November cost $10,200 on Fox News, $8,300 on CNN and $4,200 on MSNBC.

Even during the last mid-term election, commercial prices rose. For election night 2018, Fox News’ prime time ads were $71,614, five times higher than the prime time rate the year before. CNN’s rates were five times higher at $45,600 and MSNBC got $25,572 per spot, six times higher than the comparable hour in 2017.

Advertising during political years has always been a double-edged sword for many advertisers. They are wary of being caught up in controversy but crave the big audiences that tune in for politics, especially this year when the public is following the campaign more closely than ever before and turning out in record numbers to vote.

Local TV station owners are also reporting record levels of political advertising pouring in, especially those with stations in swing states.

Times are hard on broadcasters. Mounting competition from the tech giants, non-stop political turmoil, civil unrest, elections, market uncertainty, and of course the COVID-19 pandemic have all swallowed 2020 whole – and we still have two months left! Once the election is over – and only the Good Lord knows when that may be since many experts are telling us there will be no final results on the night of Nov. 3 – the television industry will be anxious to see what direction the FCC will take. 

The Trump Administration and the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai have generally followed a deregulatory trend. The repeal of net neutrality, loosening broadcast ownership restrictions under the Quadrennial Review, and removing antiquated regulations – like the main studio and minimum staffing mandates – are just a few examples.

Under a Biden Administration it seems clear net neutrality will again be pursued. Hard to imagine the benefits of having the FCC regulate internet services as a 1930s-style public utility under Title II regulations. A sure innovation killer.

A Biden Administration may also undermine the FCC’s appeal of the 3rd Circuit’s Prometheus Radio Project decision voiding the 2016 Quadrennial Review, which eliminated the newspaper/broadcast and television/radio cross-ownership rules and removed the eight voices test from the local television ownership rule. This appeal is particularly important for television broadcasters because they uniquely face overwhelming competition from the tech giants – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple – and the titans of telco – AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint/T-Mobile. Unless they are freed from the FCC’s Depression Era limits, the industry will surely go the way of the newspaper industry and extinction.

The television industry also needs to see the deregulation of joint sales agreements (JSAs) and shared service agreements (SSAs). In November 2017, the FCC under Pai repealed the attribution rules for TV JSAs, removing the Wheeler Era regulation that attributed such agreements as “ownership” interests under the duopoly limits. That decision was overturned in 2019 by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals (along with other changes to the ownership rules noted above) and remanded the proceeding to the FCC for further consideration.

As one of the very few African-American television operators, I know firsthand that the biggest obstacle to increasing diversity and minority ownership is access to financing and solid mentoring. Repeal of the JSA and SSA limits will reduce that obstacle, allow new entrants to work with experienced broadcasters in the same market, and expand ownership opportunities. The FCC for almost 50 years has given lip service to expanding diversity and minority opportunities, so I hope the FCC turns in that direction and allows the return of JSAs and SSAs. 

Alas, we will have to wait and see what the Nov. 3 election brings us.

Armstrong Williams is manager and sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast Owner of the year.

Two thirds of American adults polled (67%) said that the sources of news they turn to have presented biased views of the election. Specifically, they said those outlets had "presented factual information that favors one side of an issue in coverage of the 2020 election."

That is according to a new Pew Research Center survey that also found that more than half (56%) of respondents said those outlets had published breaking news without fully verifying it, and that 37% said those outlets made up stuff to mislead the public.

That comes as news outlets are being advised in some quarters to do something against their 24-hour-news cycle grain in reporting on the Nov. 3 election--be patient and don't call states or races too quickly.

Related: Pew Survey Finds Social Media Political News Consumers Are Less Engaged

The survey was conducted Oct. 6-12 among 10,059 adults, more than 80% of whom are registered voters. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.

Almost six in 10 (59%) said that "made-up information that is intended to mislead" causes a lot of confusion about the presidential race.

Republicans appear to have less trust in their own favorite news sources. About twice as many registered voters who back Trump said they think the news sources they turn to most often report made-up information intended to mislead, compared to only 22% of Biden supporters who said that about their favorite news outlets, while 59% of Trump backers said their outlets of choice report breaking info that hasn't been verified, vs. 50% of Biden supporters who said that.

The vast majority of the survey respondents (85%) said that Trump and Biden supporters can't agree on "basic facts about important issues," which does not bode well for healing the current political divisions (When each side was asked, 89% of Trump voters said they disagree on basic facts, and 91% of Biden voters). As troubling, 80% also said that Americans tend to get different "facts" depending on which news sources they turn to.

VUit, the streaming service featuring programming from hundreds of local TV stations, said it is planning to air a special that combines eSports stars with election night returns.

VUit eSports--Decision 2020 will start Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET and run all evening. It will be hosted by well-known gamers including Reaper, Geeb and Gamer Mom, and offer real time data and information from every state, non-biased commentary and behind the scenes activity.

Election night broadcasts--both national and local--tend to skew older and VUit said its programming is designed to be more fun for a younger demographic.

VUit said its eSports channel is no No. 2 on the OTT services curated channel lineup.

Launched by Syncbak and backed by Gray Television, VUit offers ad-supported streams from local stations and original programming. It expects to stream more than 3 million hours of live programming annually.

Nickelodeon said that former VP Joe Biden was the winner of its Kids Pick the President poll, which had to fight off a bot-driven attempt to stuff the ballot box.

With 90,000 youngsters participating, Biden got 53% while the incumbent got 47%.

Nickelodeon’s guidelines call for one vote to be counted per household device, allowing multiple kids in a family to participate. But the network detected cheating on Oct. 21, when online forums began discussing flooding the Kids Pick the President site with fraudulent votes.

More than 130,000 bot-generated votes were detected and Nickelodeon used a voter certification tool to identify those votes and remove them. 

“Though kids are not of an age to vote, Kids Pick the President is a platform where their voices do count, and they deserve to be heard. And just as kids value honesty and fairness, so do we at Nickelodeon. Therefore, out of respect for kids everywhere and in the spirit of civic responsibility, we present the name of the winner based on votes cast fairly and within our stated guidelines of one vote counted per household device,” the network said.

The “Kids’ Vote” results were revealed Tuesday night during a Nick News: Kids Pick the President special, hosted by Keke Palmer. 

NBCLX, the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations streaming news service aimed at Gen Z, will be offering election night coverage on its over-the-top, linear, digital, mobile and cable platforms.

Coverage starts at 8 p.m. ET with storytellers embedded in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Washington D.C.

NBCLX will also feature a visual artist who will be painting live through the night.

Based in Fort Worth, Texas, at the facility shared by NBC”s KXAS and Telemundo’s KXTX, NBCLX reports on issues that matter to adults 18-45.

At Gray Television, the VP for political sales cannot handle any interviews. He is “already so overworked” by the ongoing deluge of campaign commercials on the broadcaster’s 93 stations as political campaigns unleash last-minute commercial tactics, said Kevin Latek, Gray’s executive VP and chief legal & development officer. 

Similar ad assaults are underway throughout the media landscape as another wave of the $9.7 billion political juggernaut continues, according to PQ Media’s tally of national, state and local campaign spending. Industry observers said the money — predominantly for Democratic candidates and causes  —  is “unprecedented.” Everything about the process, from immense early voting to the amount of campaign funds, has forced broadcasters and political strategists to overhaul their approaches and manage ad inventory. 

The impact of early voting continues to keep political strategists hopping. By the day of the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, more than 40 million voters had cast their ballots, per CNN. Accompanying the start of early October voting was an unusual peak in TV advertising. For example, in Florida, about $9 million was spent per week for former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, and $6 million for President Donald Trump, the incumbent Republican. Operatives are also scheduling typical Halloween weekend ad binges just ahead of Election Day on Nov. 3. 

So much money is in the Democrats’ war chest that strategists are trickling it tactically to state legislative campaigns, generating countless party-funded commercials for local candidates. The goal is to flip key state legislatures in anticipation of post-U.S. Census redistricting efforts. 

Presidential and Senate campaigns are adopting an Obama-era practice of buying time on national networks such as RFD-TV and WGN America, where viewership is concentrated in swing states. Commercial time on national networks is lower than buying broadcast station ads in expensive markets. Among the major beneficiaries are sports networks, which have gotten national buys during games featuring teams from North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio, aimed at home-state viewers. 

RELATED: Cover Story: The Longest Night

Advertising Analytics, a research firm that tracks weekly spending, showed the Biden campaign significantly upped spending in key states such as Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina in the first weeks of October, just as early voting began. Campaigns are shifting their funds to swing states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania, as they sense shifting sentiments they can exploit with targeted ads.

The result: Busy — and lucrative — schedules at TV stations in key markets. 

Reaping the Bonanza

In preliminary guidance for its third-quarter 2020 financial report (scheduled for a Nov. 5 release), Gray TV said it expects political advertising revenue to be between $120 million and $125 million during the July-to-September period. That dwarfs the Q3 political ad revenue of the combined Gray and Raycom Media stations in previous campaign cycles (reflecting the January 2019 merger of the companies and divestiture of some stations). 

This year’s Senate races include seven of the 10 most-expensive campaigns ever, according to Advertising Analytics. Politico’s tally shows that the 14 most competitive and expensive races had campaign funds of $363 million for Democrats and $143 million for Republicans during the quarter ended Sept. 30.   

Democratic candidate Jaime Harrison “has raised more money than has ever been seen in South Carolina” in his race against incumbent Lindsey Graham, said Leo Kivijarv, executive VP and research director at PQ Media, a Connecticut research firm. He also cited the $100 million that former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has earmarked for Florida campaigns aimed at Hispanic get-out-the-vote initiatives, targeted to likely Biden supporters. 

Kivijarv said that TV stations are also benefiting from campaign ads aimed at Hispanics in states with sizable ethnic populations, including swing states North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan. PD Media’s data jibes with a recent Kantar Media Campaign Media Analysis Group (Kantar/CMAG) study that found a boom in Hispanic-targeted ads since September: $932 million spent on presidential commercials on TV and radio, nearly two-thirds of it backing Biden. Telemundo and Univision stations are benefiting from this spending, Kivijarv said. He also expects a splurge the week before Election Day, aimed at the dwindling number of “undecideds.”  

RELATED: The New Math of Election Coverage

Digital advertising has been a major success story this year, said Mark Jablonowski, managing partner and chief technology officer of DSPolitical, a Democratic-focused agency. He cited Democrats’ $14 million of spending on Facebook. 

“Voter-targeted digital makes the task of communicating with the right voters easier than ever,” Jablonowski said. He thinks well-funded Democratic Senate campaigns could “max out their spending everywhere, including digital,” especially in states where there wasn’t “television left to buy but there is a lot of digital inventory.”

Reaching for Everyone

The available money has made this year’s campaign “a time for tanks, not rifles,” Republican ad consultant Evan Tracey said.“Targeting is out the window. You’re reaching for everyone.” He acknowledged that shifting sentiments have encouraged campaigns to shore up spots in contested markets, which is why money for GOP ads in Ohio was diverted to Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

“Everything this year is bigger,” Steven Passwaiter, VP and general manager of  Kantar/CMAG, said. He said broadcasters are “relishing the salve” of this year’s political spending after 2016, when the Trump campaign curtailed its ad spending. Kantar’s political spending estimate has climbed to $7 billion from $6 billion — still shy of PQ Media’s number.  

RELATED: Streaming to the White House

“Money is being spent differently,” Passwaiter said. He cited Biden ads on Smithsonian Channel as both an offbeat choice and an acknowledgment that cash is available to spend on niche networks. Although he’s not surprised by the spread of money throughout October, which typically gets 40% of the cycle’s ad spending, Passwaiter said there is so much money, media spending in some smaller states is “rivaling that of the top five markets.”  

Passwaiter said the spending could continue after Nov. 3, especially if there is an almost-inevitable runoff for the Senate seats from Georgia. That campaign could run through January, he said. 

Streaming services are set to have an outsized impact on this year’s election coverage, both in terms of audience size and in the contributions they will make to more traditional broadcast coverage.

“There has been a lot of speculation about streaming in the news business but this year has shown that streaming is taking hold in a big way,” said Seni Tienabeso, executive producer of ABC News Live Prime, a primetime streaming show anchored by Linsey Davis. “The pandemic has really accelerated what was already happening in terms of people looking for other avenues to watch news, and you can see that in the audience growth. We had over 9 million people alone watching ABC News Live for the first debate. That is a huge number that ranks with any other broadcast.” 

Tienabeso and others said the streaming services are providing audiences with a much wider array of stories and coverage than viewers have ever seen. 

RELATED: Cover Story: The Longest Night

Users who open the CBS News app will be able to access 12 different live feeds from 24-hour streaming service CBSN, said Christy Tanner, executive VP and general manager of CBS News Digital. They include a live feed of the CBS broadcast coverage, the national CBSN feed and 10 local feeds from CBS’s owned stations. 

“This will give us enormous flexibility in covering live events, races and outcomes simultaneously,” Tanner said.

To make it easier for viewers to find breaking news and content, CBS is launching a new capability to provide live, interactive alerts. “Viewers will get an interactive graphic on the screen when something is breaking and they will be able to use their remote to navigate to it,” Tanner said. 

Streaming services will also give audiences additional
ways to access network feeds on authenticated apps, streaming services or YouTube, where PBS NewsHour will be streaming election coverage. 

Univision will stream its national broadcast coverage starting at 7 p.m. ET on Nov. 3, senior politics editor Carlos Chirinos said, with digital teams filling breaks in the network coverage with original digital content. 

“We will be providing a heavy focus on the local level, because all politics is local,” Chirinos said. 

RELATED: The New Math of Election Coverage

The continuous nature of streaming services also gives news organizations more space and time to explain what promises to be a very complex election. “If you are just approaching this like a horse race for 12, 24, 36 hours or however [long] this goes on, that isn’t helpful to voters,” ABC News Live executive producer Katie den Daas said. “We’re preparing for the long haul so that people can turn on ABC News Live and get the kind of information they want.” 

Part of that will be improved data analytics. Journalists from the ABC News-owned polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com will appear on ABC News Live, den Daas said. “They will be able to explain what is happening and why,” she said. “As we inch closer to election and we are inundated with numbers and polling, they’ll be able to really frame and discuss what those numbers might mean or not mean.” 

On election night, Newsy will draw extensively on its investigative and longer-form reporting on such subjects as voting by mail, the ballot-counting process, voter suppression concerns, the integrity of the election and the Hispanic vote, Matt Simon, supervising producer for PM content at Newsy, said. 

“It is easy to go to roundtables of pundits and much harder to produce analysis that is based on fact and data and still find a way to make it compelling and interesting but that is our mission,” Simon said. 

Pandemic-related restrictions have also prompted networks to adopt much more coordinated strategies between their various platforms.

RELATED: Stations, Networks Eye Boom in Political Spending

Fox News will have a separate control room, said VP of politics and the Washington Bureau Cherie Grzech, from which she will talk to TV, digital and radio reporters, then route feeds to the various control rooms handling Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Nation and Fox News Radio. 

“You will see reporters on multiple platforms throughout the evening,” Grzech said. “We are definitely trying to maximize the ability to move our people from one Fox platform to another.” 

Last week’s dueling town halls delivered a more liberal audience to Joe Biden and a slightly more right-leaning cohort to President Trump, according to data from Samba TV.

Samba uses viewing of MSNBC as a stand in for more liberal and more Democratic viewers and viewing of Fox News Channel to identify more conservative and Republican viewers.

Related: Comscore to Measure CTV with Samba TV

Both town halls generated larger audiences than their predecessors, with Biden’s second being seen by 6.9 million households on ABC, up 291% from his first town hall and Trump being observed by 6.3 million households, up 209%, on a variety of NBCUniversal outlets.

Samba said 2.9 million households watched at least five minutes of both the second Trump and second Biden town hall, even though they mostly aired at the same time.

Related: People Watching Dem Debate Were Big TV Watchers

In his second town hall, Biden lost a lot of heavy MSNBC viewers, but both he and Trump added some hardcore Fox News viewers, according to Dr. Jeffrey Silverman, director of data science and analytics at Samba TV.

The handful of viewers who watched all four town halls skewed toward heavy MSNBC viewers and medium Fox News viewers.

“In general, cable news viewership is up during October compared to earlier this year. Thus, there are likely more undecided or middle-of-the-road voters watching MSNBC and Fox News now,” said Silverman. “Or, put another way, the audiences of both of those networks have grown in October likely by attracting more Centrists who are potentially undecided. Beyond that, it's hard to use the town hall or debate viewership to say much about undecided voters.”

While making predictions in 2020 can be perilous, Silverman expects viewership to rise for the final debate between Biden and Trump.

“We saw 3-4 times increases in the audiences for both candidates from their first town hall to the second ones. In addition, both town halls had 2-3 times larger audiences than the first presidential debate and the VP debate,” he said. “Based on that trend and the election getting ever closer, I would bet that the next debate will have even higher viewership and that the audience will be a very broad cross-section of the U.S., everyone from party hardliners to swing state undecideds to the Person on the Street curious to see what the final arguments of (or between) the candidates will be.”

It’s been a big year for politics in general, but in September things really started heating up. Not only was conversation around the 2020 election growing louder by the day, the month also brought the first presidential debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. All of the surrounding drama has helped keep people glued to news networks. 

According to Vizio’s Inscape, the TV data company with insights from a panel of more than 16 million smart TVs, overall, nearly 60% of active TVs tuned in to the first presidential debate. (Read our full recap of the debate here.)

When news broke that President Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 — mere days after the debate — viewers tuned into cable news to get the details. 

Per Inscape, of all the live, linear minutes watched from Friday, Oct. 2 through Sunday, Oct. 4, 5.16% of the time was spent on Fox News -— slightly less watch-time than the previous weekend (5.17% from Sept. 25-27). CNN, on the other hand, more than doubled its share of watch-time, up to 4.61% vs. 2.20%. Time spent with MSNBC was up as well, with a 2.17% share duration this past weekend compared to 1.80% the weekend of Sept. 25-27. 

In this time of political polarization across our country, one interesting question is how many cable news viewers take a “fair and balanced” approach to TV news consumption by watching more than one of the major networks. Inscape examined viewership crossover in September among the big three: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. 

The highest crossover: 54% of MSNBC viewers tuned into at least 10 minutes of CNN during September. The lowest crossover: only 12% of Fox News viewers tuned into MSNBC. CNN was the most evenly split, with 26% also watching Fox News and 34% also watching MSNBC.

Inscape also examined crossover for some of the Sunday morning news shows (NBC's Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Fox News Sunday). On the high end: 21% of State of the Union viewers tuned into at least 10 minutes of Meet the Press in September. The lowest crossover: 3.9% of Fox News Sunday viewers tuned into State of the Union.

But what do all these viewers have in common? They’ve all watched at least some of the below shows in September, and game shows and soap operas dominate the list (excludes sports/news/religious programming).

Nickelodeon said it will be airing a new Nick News: Kids Pick the President special urging youths “vote” on Tuesday. 

The results of the poll will be released on Oct. 27 during a Nick News TV special hosted by Keke Palmer.

"Through Kids Pick the President and the return of Nick News, Nickelodeon continues to inform and educate children on the democratic process and the importance of voting," said Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson, the 60 Minutes veteran who was recently named VP of news programming at Nickelodeon and executive producer of Nick News.

Related: LaGuerre-Wilkinson Named VP of News at Nickelodeon

"Although our audience is not of voting age, we still have a responsibility to help amplify their voices around the issues that are most important to them in a space they can call their own, so they know that they too can make a difference by playing a role in the electoral process," Laguerre-Wilkinson said.

The hour-long Nick News: Kids Pick the President special will provide a thorough overview of the basics of voting and give kids a platform to voice their concerns on the issues they care about most in the 2020 presidential election, such as COVID-19, racial equality and the environment.

"Voting in my first election when I was 18 was extremely important to me and now more than ever, it’s crucial that this next generation of kids grow up with an understanding of our political system and how they can be agents of change," said Palmer. "I'm so proud to be a part of the Nickelodeon family and this special, which will teach kids about the election and empower them to stand up for what they believe in."

Kids can visit KidsPickthePresident.com to vote for Joe Biden or Donald Trump and download an “I Voted” sticker.

The Kids Pick the President "Kids' Vote" is an informal non-scientific poll, meant for entertainment purposes only, Nickelodeon notes.

Spanish-language television is seeing big increases in political ad spending, particularly in swing state Florida, according to Kantar’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Nationwide since Sept. 1, Kantar calculates that $932 million has been spent on presidential campaign ads across TV and radio and that 62% of that ($581 million ) has been for Joe Biden. President Trump’s re-election campaign has been backed by $352 million in TV and radio ads during that time.

That number includes ads already scheduled to run through Nov. 3.

Three of the top five markets in terms of presidential election ad spending are in Florida, with Orlando seeing $51.2 million, Miami getting $47.9 million and Tampa garnering $46.1 million.

Kantar noted that since January 2019, $24 million has been spent in Florida on Spanish-language broadcast TV to reach the large Puerto Rican, Cuban and Venezuelan populations in the state.

Nearly $5 million has been spent in Orlando on Spanish-language broadcast TV, compared to less than $1 million during the entire 2016 presidential election cycle. Many ads have focused on Puerto Rican immigrants, many of whom relocated there after Hurricane Maria.

Spending on Spanish language network advertising was more than $15 million, up from $3 million in 2016. 

For the September to Nov. 3 period, Phoenix ranks No. 2  

The other top 5 market is Philadelphia.

A new study by Advertiser Perceptions found that half of the marketers and media buyers surveyed are taking evasive action because of unprecedented levels of political ad clutter as Election Day approaches.

Of 300 advertisers surveyed, 52% said they have altered fall media buys because of political commercials. Advertisers Perceptions found that 33% have held back ads to avoid the rush of political ads and 18% have added frequency buys to try to cut through candidate clutter.

Advertisers expect Fox and CNN to have the most political advertisers this fall.

Advertiser Perception found that advertisers’ persona dissatisfaction with political advertising might be affecting ad spending decisions. In the study, 80% said they believe the media should fact-check political ads and 60% said they would opt out of receiving political advertising.

The survey found that 66% of marketers and 59% of agency execs expected Joe Biden to win the presidential election.

The survey was taken in September. Of the 300 respondents, 40% were marketers and 60% from agencies.

Tegna, releasing preliminary financial results for the third-quarter said that a record-breaking year for political advertising will boost revenue by 34% to $738 million. 

Excluding political advertising, revenue is expected to be up 14%, thanks to acquisitions and stronger than expected spending offsetting the effects COVID-19 have had on local businesses.

Tegna acquired stations from Dispatch in August 2019 and Nextstar in 2019.

Net income is expected to come in at $132 million, double a year ago. 

The company also said full-year subscription revenue for the full year of 2020 is expected to be up in the high-twenty percentage range. The company previously provided guidance that subscription revenue would be up in the mid 20% range.

The vice presidential debate Wednesday night drew 57.9 million viewers, up 56% from 37.2 million viewers in 2016, according to Nielsen.

Nielsen said that 18 networks aired live or tape delayed coverage from about 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET and that overall, the debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence generated a 33.7 household rating, up 41% from 2016.

Four years ago, when Pence debated Tim Kaine, it drew a 23.5 rating.

Related: Viewership Insights for the First Presidential Debate

The first presidential debate on Sept. 29 drew 73.1 million people, according to Nielsen.

For the VP debate, Fox News had the most total viewers with 11.5 million people tuning in.

ABC had 9.4 million viewers, CNN had 7.3 million, MSNBC had 6.7 million, NBC had 6.6 million, CBS had 5.2 million and Fox had 4.1 million.

Fox’s streaming service Tubi said it launched News on Tubi in the U.S. with channels offering live news from providers including 17 Fox Television stations.

Other news providers including NewsNow from Fox, Fox Soul, Bloomberg TV, NBC News Now, PeopleTV, CBS, WeatherNation, Cheddar, Altice USA’s News 12 New York, fubo Sports Network and Black News Channel.

News on Tubi will expand to offer stations from Hearst Television, Tubi also said two of their large station groups will be signing on. Later in October, News on Tubi will become the streaming home for Euronews World live in the United States, launch the first 24-hour Spanish-language news stream from Estrella Media’s Estrella News network, and offer streaming news from USA Today.

Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network are separate.

In an election year, ad-supported streaming services have been upping the amount of news they offering their viewers, with outlets including STIRR and Haystack introducing channels dealing with the debates and other elements of the presidential campaign and local races.

“Tubi is building the best free news streaming offering, utilizing the local news expertise of Fox and other leading national and international news outlets to offer the information viewers need now more than ever,” said Farhad Massoudi, CEO of Tubi. “We will continue to evolve News on Tubi to offer more choices while also diversifying other content choices to serve our young, diverse, and growing userbase.”

As part of its #WhatToExpect2020 project to fight election disinformation, PEN America has launched an interactive quiz to test web surfers' knowledge of how to "spot, fact check, and stop" false information.

The quiz includes personalities--Ian Cumming, John Lithgow, and others--featured in its YouTube video on disinformation.

The PEN America Project includes "disinformation defense" workshops, regional town halls, and a webinar on "election calls, projections, and how news organizations plan to navigate the challenges of election night 2020."

PEN (which stands for Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists) America defends free expression worldwide.

VUit, the over-the-top service featuring 200 local stations including those owned by Gray Television, launched a new Battleground States channel featuring campaign news from swing states around the country.

The new channel features news content from TV stations carried by VUit, including coverage from states including Iowa, Colorado, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.

Related: 200 Stations Jump Into New Streaming Venture

“We’re in virtually all of the key states with the best on-the-ground reporting in our communities. Voters across the country will benefit from our front-line, political content that allows viewers to educate themselves on relevant issues. The ability for viewers to consume important local content happening elsewhere is at the core of what VUit is all about,” said Pat LaPlatney, co-CEO and president of Gray Television.

Related: Voces Presents 'Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground' Oct. 6

VUit early launched Politics Uncut, another channel devoted to election news.

VUit is owned and managed by technology company Syncbak. Gray has made an investment in VUit and stations owned by other companies are participating in the service.

“In launching VUit, one of our key objectives was enabling viewers anywhere to connect with local towns and see what’s happening through the power of streaming,” said Syncbak CEO and founder Jack Perry. “We are at a watershed moment with the 2020 election, where just keeping up with the national news or your hometown news will not provide the viewer with the full picture. Our hope with the launch of Battleground States is that we fill in some of those blind spots.” 

The first presidential debate of the 2020 election drew 73.1 million viewers, down 13% from the first debate four years ago, which drew 84 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

President Trump and former VP Joe Biden squaring off drew a 40.2 household rating, down from the 47.6 rating generated when Trump took on Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Nielsen said the figures include live coverage on 16 broadcast and cable networks. The rating service notes that out-of-home viewing and connected TV are included in the 2020 figures, and could contribute as much as 11% of viewing for televised political events.

Related: Viewership Insights for the First Presidential Debate

Fox News Channel drew 17.1 million viewers, the most of any TV network. It was followed by ABC with 12.1 million, NBC with 9.3 million , CNN with 7.9 million, MSNBC with 7 million, CBS with 6.1 million, Fox with 5.2 million and CNN with 51,000. 

While signaling Fox News' Chris Wallace had tried his best, the Commission on Presidential Debates said Wednesday it would change the format for the remaining debates--two presidential, one vice presidential.

That followed the Sept. 29 debate moderated by Wallace that devolved into a series of personal attacks and the President consistently talking over his opponent. The commission sponsors the televised debates.

"Last night’s debate made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues," the commission said. "The CPD will be carefully considering the changes that it will adopt and will announce those measures shortly."

It ended with a nod to Wallace, who was criticized for not keeping the President's outbursts better in check but also drew lots of sympathy for what most conceded would have been a herculean feat had he accomplished it: "The Commission is grateful to Chris Wallace for the professionalism and skill he brought to last night’s debate and intends to ensure that additional tools to maintain order are in place for the remaining debates."

In a joint memo to staffers, Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace also had Chris Wallace's back. 

"We'd like to take a moment to thank and congratulate Chris Wallace for moderating last night's extraordinary debate," they said. "We are extremely proud of his professionalism, skill and fortitude in a unique situation while doing everything possible to hold both candidates accountable. No moderator could have managed a debate of that magnitude better than Chris."

CNN Political Analyst Bakari Sellers may have put it best when he said he felt sorry for Wallace as he attempted to "comb through the chaos" to find a debate. 

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Trump by 42 points among registered Hispanic voters, but the lead is narrower in always unpredictable Florida, where Biden’s advantage has narrowed to 16 points from 19 point in March, according to new polling by Univision.

Nationwide, 66% of Hispanics said they plan to vote for the Biden-Harris ticket, while 24% were for Trump-Pence.

The president’s overall approval among Hispanics is 30%, according to the Univision poll, but in Florida, 39% of Hispanic approve of Trump.

In addition to a national poll, Univision conducted Latino voter surveys in Florida, Arizona and Texas. 

In Florida, Biden led by 52% to 35%. In Arizona, Biden led 66% to 25%. In Texas, Biden was ahead 66% to 25%. 

On one subject in the national news recently, 46% of Hispanics oppose moving forward with appointing a new Supreme Court justice to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg while 41% are in favor. 

The biggest concern among 40% of Hispanics is the coronavirus. According to the poll, 73% disapproved  of Trump’s management of the pandemic, which has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths, and 61% believe that Biden would have handled it better. 

The poll also found that 76% of Hispanics support the protests that have occurred in recent weeks over the deaths of African-Americans caused by police and 58% said they would welcome a reduction in funding for the police. At the same time 59% of Hispanic said they believe Biden would do better on law and order, an issue Trump has been jawboning.

Nearly half of Hispanics--48%--said they plan to vote by mail. In Texas, where not all voters have the option to vote by mail, only 33% said that was how they expected to cast their ballot.

Univision found that in the Arizona Senate race, 55% of Latinos favor Democrat Mark Kelly while 21% like incumbent Marth McSally, a Republican. In Texas, MJ Hegar leads Republican incumbent John Cornyn 47% to 35%.

The Univision polls were connected by Latino Decisions and North Star Opinion Research from Sept. 17 through Sept. 24. The findings will be featured in Univision’s programming, from its morning show Despierta América, to the different editions of its daily Noticiero Univision newscasts and its public affairs program Al Punto.

Streaming service Haystack News said it is launching new channels for the presidential and vice presidential debates.

In addition to live coverage of the events on dedicated channels, Haystack will have channels featuring pre- and post-debate coverage and analysis from the 300 local broadcasters and national news outlets from which Haystack gets content.

“Interest in coverage tied to the November 2020 election is propelling Haystack News to record levels of usage and engagement. We are delighted to be the one-stop destination for the best-in-election coverage,” said Daniel Barreto, Haystack TV CEO and co-founder. “Haystack News has become the platform of choice for broadband-only households looking for a free AVOD service dedicated to curating the wealth of news coverage produced for this election season.”

Haystack News had channels dedicated to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.

The first presidential debate will take place Sept. 29. The vice presidential debate is being held Oct. 7. The second presidential debate is scheduled for Oct. 15 and the third faceoff is set for Oct. 22. 

Data analytics firm Lotame, which says it taps billions of anonymous online profiles, has looked at the digital behavior of millions of political TV watchers and suggests they are in something of a branding sweet spot for marketers targeting addressable advertising.

“As the 2020 election quickly approaches, and COVID restrictions are keeping people at home and in front of the television, political marketers have a good chance of engaging consumers through the biggest screen at home,” said Alexandra Theriault, chief customer officer at Lotame. “Knowing information like what other shows politically engaged viewers watch and what industries they are likely to work in, helps campaigns build a profile of what messaging might resonate best in the last months before ballots are cast.”

According to Lotame Panorama*, political TV watchers** are more likely to be heavy TV viewers and hold management positions in the IT industry. In addition to politics, they like "easy to watch" genres including travel shows, home and garden shows, variety, and game shows. They are less likely to watch genres like drama, science fiction and action shows.

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IT professionals are the most likely to be political TV watchers (23%), followed by healthcare (14%) in the number two slot. Only 2% of those in the insurance industry are political TV watchers, while perhaps surprisingly given the political activism of some in Hollywood, only 1% of those in the media and entertainment industry were identified as political TV watchers.

The largest percentage of political TV watchers are in management positions (42%), followed by non-management jobs (27%), C-suite positions (19%), and board members and ownership (12%).

*"A suite of data enrichment solutions that use first-, second- and third-party data to create and analyze addressable audiences."

**Political TV watchers are defined as "people who have tuned-in to political TV networks, talk shows, debates, town halls, and congressional hearings."