Understanding Snapchat's Role in Political Coverage With Peter Hamby

social media, including Snapchat. Home base for my next guest, Peter Hamby, is the host of that platform's daily political program, Good Luck America. I'm happy to have him here to talk about this Bonker's presidential race and Snapchats place in it. Thanks for making time today, Peter, Yeah, thanks for having me. So, if this were a normal year, you might already be in Milwaukee the side of the d n C. But thanks to the virus this year, there's no convention floor,

no confetti falling on the frenzy crowds. So tell me what can viewers at home even expect to see in the absence of the usual spectacle. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, like I, my lifeblood is traveling and covering this stuff and I and I also personally love Milwaukee randomly like some good hotels. Spotted Cow beer is great,

so I would have loved to be there. Um. Look, you know, from my conversations with the d n c UH convention organizers, you know, people my old friends at CNN and other places, you know, I think what we're just going to have to expect is something extremely boring. I mean, with all due respect to the convention planners who are trying to make the convention you know, fun and virtual, and they're trying to innovate. Um, it's going to end up looking like a bunch of speeches live

streamed on television. I mean, that's just what it's going to look like. And I think we shouldn't overthink it and overcomplicated. It's going to be a lot of dry, boring speeches, just sort of live streamed. Um. Does that have any implications for the race though, because sometimes the convention was the place where this candidate got a boost or that candidate dropped. Yeah. No, there's typically a convention boost in UH for in the polls for one candidate

or the other. But that's pretty ephemeral. Um, A lot of a lot of there are a lot of atmospheric things that happened in a campaign UM debates the selection of the vice presidential pick convention um, and they can lead to a sugar high. You know. I was covering Sarah Palin when she was announced in St. Paul in two eight, and McCain jumped like four or five points in the polls, but a leveled out because they're just fundamentals.

And the fundamentals of this race are that Donald Trump is deeply unpopular, that the pandemic is such a drag on you know, him, and the economy, that Joe Biden is winning nationally anywhere from six to ten points, and then this wing states from due to six points in places like Arizona and Texas or now swing states, which is wild. Um. So the fundamentals are what they are.

And I would say that the conventions, uh, you know, and with all the respect to a lot of my friends who are working in politics and immersed in this stuff, they're kind of boring in the first place and didn't matter that much in the first place. Um. You know, I think Donald Trump in sixteen was such a you know, charismatic lightning rod that everyone wanted to hang on his every word and his you know, people watched his convention, um Hillary and him both had about forty million viewers.

I mean, Andy, I would be surprised if this commence. These conventions got sorry, the dumb one at least got half of that, right. I just think people are less interested in horse race politics and the atmospherics of the campaign trail right now, and are way more concerned with their health and the economy and their personal lives and staying at home. And a lot of people have just kind of rendered a verdict on Trump and are ready

for this kind of thing to be over. I would say, like the VP pick like will get some excitement for a few weeks, but it might not even matter that much either. You know. That's just people just kind of want the election to happen, and the usual ups and downs of a campaign are just not being covered, and they're not being followed except by the obsessives. Well, it just seems like the coverage to date, and I assume up until November is Trump Trump, Trump and Biden seeming

to deliberately hang back. Any reason to think it will be any different as we, I guess head to the beginning of the home stretch. I don't think so. I really don't. I think you're smart to say that he's deliberately doing that, because there was an early take in the press that you know, Biden was trapped in his basement,

how will he be able to campaign? And again, back in March and April, we didn't really We thought maybe the you know, health scare might recede at some point in the fall and Biden would be able to get back out there. I think they are realizing that just kind of a do no harm campaign is actually working.

I mean, every every piece of evidence points to that. Um. The entire political environment, with or without the pandemic was was about Donald Trump and Biden being a safe alternative, which was his bet going into the primarias even before coronavirus turned out to be actually pretty sharp. UM. And

so I don't I don't see that changing. I think this has disrupted, um, the sort of usual strategies of a campaign, and kind of an interesting and useful way if you work in politics, right like why you know, people, you definitely lose access to voters and local media markets when you can't travel little Columbus, Ohio in Las Vegas and do these campaign rallies. But you know, increasingly. Unlike state and local campaigns, presidential campaigns were already virtual. They

were already happening on your screens at all times. It was all about who could command attention in in the era of social media and earned media. And you know, do you need to be out there shaking hands every day when you can just zoom into Raleigh and do some local TV um, you know back you know, in the in the veeps, in the veep stakes chatter. A criticism of Susan Rice was that she couldn't she hasn't run a campaign before, and that would be a challenge

for her. And I remember reading a column in l A Times about that and thinking, what campaign trail right? Like like, it's clear that you don't necessarily need to be traveling and meeting voters and being on the road to win a campaign. The thing that's lost, of course, is voter contact, which is incredibly important right now. People aren't really you know, amped to answer their doors when

people knock and ask them if they're supporting Biden her rump. Uh. So, campaigns need to innovate and find ways to reach voters. But I don't see the campaign changing that much between over the next few months. Well, and what about the John Cable News. Because you come to this, you've been at SNAP now for over five years, you come from CNN.

You have that background. When you look at your former employer, cable news in general, how much has it changed from when you were there last When you when you see the Trump centric coverage, do you see it as appropriate or as others criticize it for focusing too much on

him to boost ratings. Honestly, I think it's more a louder like I I don't think it's any surprise that in the last four years we've seen on all cable networks a move away from uh, sort of in the field news coverage back to sort of the panel focused chatter, right Like an a block of a cable news show will generally be like roundup of the news. Then they'll bring in some guests in prime time. It's increasingly you know four people or you know six people in some

cases arguing with each other. There there's deliberate provocations thrown in the mix. Um, you know. I remember I was in South Carolina for the primaries this year, and I remember seeing a CNN photographer. I did a hit on CNN with John King UH, which is one of my favorite shows. He's one of my favorite guys there, and he was sort of observed to me that there were no satellite trucks down in the state in South Carolina.

And to put that in context, I had covered two previous presidential campaigns with CNN, and you go to Iowa, good New Hampshire, go to Ohio, wherever CNN will be all in on this stuff. Um, they would have reporters in the field on primary nights, on election nights that have a bunch of satellite trucks and on these states to support their reporting cast out in the field, and

this time they only had a couple. The rest were down in UM Charleston doing these big CNN town halls, which have actually been really educational and the ratings drivers for CNN UM and it's been a good innovation on their part. But UH, it just represented to me that a lot of the energy, UH and of coverage was just going through the studios and panels at the bureau in New York in DC and not in the field.

And I think that's you know, there are some exceptions. Obviously, the anti racism protests that erupted recently it was a real showcase of reporting muscle from CNN and MSNBC. I had plenty of friends who are out in the field covering those things. But yeah, I mean it's just everything reverts back to Trump all the time. And you saw that in early phases of the pandemic, when this was a story about public health and uh, you know, the chaos that this virus was reaking on not just this

country but the world. But it very quickly became on cable TV like a Trump story, like what has he done? And you can't separate Trump from the coronavirus, of course, But I noticed early on a big lack of stories that a lot of these TV networks were equipped to cover, going to different countries, different parts, you know, of the world, sort of showcase how this was impacting real humans and not just the politics of it. Um. So that's you know,

cable news has always been about politics. It was when I worked there. But I do think Trump is still the the puppet master of these places in a lot of ways. Well, of course, now you're you're sitting and covering this from a very different seat at Snapchat with your show good Luck America. I want to give listeners a taste of that. So let's just listen to a clip here. Dr Anthony Faucci is America's point man on

the science of coronavirus. Yes, I mean obviously. Today he joined us on good Luck America to talk COVID nineteen conspiracy theories and whether football season is actually going to happen blue. Hey, Dr Fauci, the first thing I want to ask you about is there's this theory spreading around the Internet that five G towers are weakening the immune system and forcing people to get COVID nineteen poisons. Yeah,

that's easy. That's thoroughly preposterous, untrue, and actually ridiculous. So for good Luck America, for those who have not seen it, how would you describe your approach because it is very different from a lot of the political programming out there, primarily because you're speaking to snapchats gen z crowd. Yeah,

and that there that that cuts two ways. So in the United States, Snapchat reaches of all thirteen year olds, right, So sometimes people talk about millennials, like, I think our audience is more primarily gen Z. It's it's young, um. And when I started at Snapchat in presidential campaign was happening then. Uh, and that's sort of when we conceived of the show. Um, you know, through some conversations with

Shawn Mills, my boss who runs content for us. It's now just started to think about what a show would look like on a mobile screen. And you know, mobile video and social media, that stuff had been out there, but you know, no one had really thought deeply about how to make it really engaging for vertical screen and to fit inside Snapchat, which is really tactile. You can swipe around and swipe up and like you're competing with attention for your best friends, right, Like that's what Snapchat is.

So the show has to really grab you. Um. So the kind of interesting thing we found when we're piloting the show and shooting it again way back at the end of out in Iowa during the last campaign, was the format itself has to change drastically. We were shooting in vertical video to the point which was confusing for other cameramen who are out in the field with us in that campaign. We're telling my crew that their cameras were tilted sideways. Are like, yeah, I know, man, that's

what we're doing on purpose. Um, So, you know, pacing music, humor. A lot of things that in the again attention economy of the internet needs to happen to grab a viewer are really important for our show. But the other thing that we found is there's just not a lot of trust out there in the world. Um. And that's true for many things. It's true of universities, it's true of churches, it's true of politics. Uh, and it's true of the

news media. And Uh. We have really worked hard to kind of develop a lot of trust with our viewers. And part of that is, you know, I I'm probably maybe I'm one of the older hosts on Snapchat, but I do bring credibility to the table. I can book guests like Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci and Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz from both parties. I have experience covering politics. Um. But I tried to at least talk like a normal

human being. Uh. And that was my m O back at CNN was how do you explain stuff that sounds kind of opaque and noisy to your grandma, to your you know, seventeen year old cousin. Most people, most people in this country do not follow politics in the way that you and I do, and the way that Twitter users do. And I fundamentally held on to that for a very long time, and I ink that it's snap Um. This goes back to one of my very first conversations

with Evan Spiegeler founder. There's just this belief that a lot of people using Snapchat are young. They're accessing the world through their phones and through Snapchat, and you can't talk down to them. Um. And at the same time, you can't be like that Steve Bushemy gift where he shows up in the school with the skateboard and he's like, how do you do fellow kids? Just this is this is a sort of a word that's become a little bit of a fetish and news and talent world, but like,

you just have to be authentic. You just have to be yourself. There's been times when I've been shooting in an episode and my producer like asked me to say some word like like lit or savage, right, which is maybe the vernacular of that generation at least a few years ago. But that's not a word I Peter would normally say, and they just I went back to talking like a normally would. Um, we should point out by

the way, you're thirty eight, which is relatively young. Let's also be honest, you might as well be Methuselah given Snapchat's demographic. Thanks for calling me out. Uh. I have one other note on that, though, which is, you know, I was just looking at this yesterday. People sort of think young folks are um, you know, radical, or you know, they only care about climate change and like marijuana, and it's just not true. Um. Young people are incredibly earnest.

They are very skeptical politics, and like very much more disassociated with political parties than older generations. Um. At the same time, the top issues for quote unquote young people are healthcare, in the economy. Um, it takes different forms, right. I try to on my show talk a lot about things right now, like debt and rent evictions. Right, those are things that I think young people care about, um, you know, going back to school, college campuses. But those

are under the umbrella of the economy. It's not just doing shows about you know, Bernie Sanders and you know, uh, Greta Tunberg, like those are things that are important, but they're just of a piece. Uh. You know. We we interviewed Anthony Faucci, Joe Biden, Um, you know, this week we had an interview up with Jamie Harrison, who's running for Senate in South Carolina against Lindsey Graham. You know, these are things that would appear on national news too,

they just have a different look and feel about them. Well, anyone who's making a career out of trying to connect with young people about something as important but challenging for them to follow us politics. As far as I'm concerned, that's you're doing the Lord's work. But you know, in terms of at the end of the day, you're I still think you're kind of serving spinach on a platform that,

with all due respect, is a candy shop. So is there a risk that you can sort of, you know, mash the bitter pill a little too much to the point where it's it's not neutral shows anymore. Yeah, that's a fair question. I mean, like and I think like all of media, you know, Discover has it's fun stuff and the stuff you want to share and talk about with your friends. Um, and uh, you know, more serious stuff.

My dad always talked about. My parents both worked in television news as well, and growing up in the house, we would always have long you know, the local news in Richmond, Virginia, and then like NBC Nightly News, and then what comes on after that, it's like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and like that's dessert. Like that's the stuff my my parents would would watch too, and that's

fair like not like everyone has their interests beyond the spinach. Uh. So again, I think that we really try to make this stuff not entertaining, but just a little more accessible. I know we're competing for attention with other platforms that you know, sorry, other content that might be more interesting in the moment, and like the Daily Mail and ESPN and BuzzFeed are all right there coexisting alongside. Good Luck America. Um. But you know, we reached ten million people on election

night in that's a huge number. NBC News Stay tuned does very very well. That's NBC News is news show. Again, I do think there is a This is something I've noticed a little different too from the election of Donald Trump. UM activated young people into politics on on in both

political parties and in neither political party. But there's kind of like an earnestness and seriousness about politics now that I detect among viewers versus when I first started, when I first started, and frankly, the tone of the show was like this too. Politics was still sort of a little bit of a game and a circus, right, Like that show on Showtime is called the Circus Um still, which feels kind of cynical actually, but that's how a lot of us in political media covered politics before Donald

Trump came along. Now people do want to know about um immigration reform, and they do want to know about social justice, like these are things that are part and parcel with people's lives. You know. Uh, some days, sure, we'll do a show and it won't do as well as we like, and then some day, as we do a show, four million people watch it. Um, Good Luck America has two points over two point three million subscribers,

and we do it daily. Like that's a not insignificant amount of people who are tuning in to hear about polls, and they're tuning in to hear about activism, and they're tuning in to hear about um you know these days like you know, Joe Biden and swing states like those are things that used to be very nerdy and now they're kind of mainstream. Um. So I'm confident just based on the fact that I'm still here and doing this, and people are watching that. There's a hunger for this

stuff alongside things that are fun, which is normal. I mean, like we all want escapism from this moment too, sure, and Snap's got plenty of that. A lot of other digital platforms have that. You know, you talk about the scale of your show of the platform. It's interesting, you know, I think people have sort of lost sight, frankly, of how big Snap is. It's got more daily users in

Twitter and TikTok combined. I mean, but it seems to have a lower profile, and it's almost in a good way because I think it's avoided a lot of the controversies that have engulfed the big tech platforms. How do you describe the perch that Snap is? Does it differ in any way from the other digital platforms? How's it really kind of escaped the harsh glare that a lot of the other digital platforms seem to be under right now. Like, I agree with you that I want to get into

that that we are sort of forgotten in some ways. Again, this is more like a press insider thing, um, But I don't think we've escaped attention or notoriety. UM. On some of the misinformation, sort of fake news, privacy safety stuff that other platforms have because we're sort of forgotten. It's because I think we have the right values around these things. I mean, there's nothing like stopping these subcommittees on the Hill from pulling Snapchat up in front of

them to testify. We don't get caught up there because we don't have the same problems the other platforms do. You know. Part of that is the way the platform

is constructed. You know, it's not it's it's constructed to be sort of a more at least on the on the quote unquote social media side, more connective between your close friends rather than broadcasting outwards, so we're not suffering from the kind of like algorithmic virality problems that other people are um And then on the other side, on Discovery, we've taken like a curated approach to news and content. We work with trusted partners, not just in news but

in media. We act as gatekeepers for them and we work with them to make sure the content is not only good and compelling, but it follows our guidelines. And you don't see that with the other platforms who are just sort of playing whack a mole according to the news cycle and whatever happens to them outside. Um, so again, I'm a journalist. I came here from CNN after a decade. There's a reason I came to work here. Wasn't just

like to work at a cool tech company. Is because I believed in the vision around news and content and the idea of what I just said earlier, that we have a unique opportunity to reach an entire generation of people that are disconnected from news cycles. That adults are, older, folks are rather and we've put in play certain guardrails around that content to make sure that it's safe and trustworthy.

So that is great, and that's that's that's the reason I think we have escaped, like escaped or not seeing a lot of scrutiniess because I think we're doing things right now. To the first point you made, like I think that, Yeah, you know, twenty teenen when Snapchat was scaling rapidly when I joined, Um, there was a ton of press coverage and attention and scrutiny on Snapchat and people call it at the Snapchat election and all that

stuff is pretty silly. But um, you know, I think snap has has grown into a mature smart company now. And maybe that because it's you know, almost you know, nine years old, it's not as interesting to people anymore. And then you see Quimby and TikTok and all these new things bling. I mean, the new thing is always the sexy thing and the fun thing. But you know again, I'm happy to position ourselves against against those two companies

in particular. I mean, on on the TikTok side, we have uh, you know, values that I just articulated around misinformation versus TikTok, which is just drowning and conspiracy theories like hard line directly in some millions of teenage brains every day, right like almost ninety million views on the hashtag pizza gate a few weeks ago. Conspiracies about five G That stuff is rampant on TikTok despite all the

press they get about like hype houses. Um. And then you know, you know, on the Quippy front, um, I have lots of friends who worked there. But you know, this is the point of personal privilege. But we've been we've been thinking about mobile content for years now, you know, like the way they were a position was you know, we are going to you know, really innovate around mobile content. We've been doing that, Like we've had a focus group of you know, over two million daily users every day

telling us what works and what doesn't. And you know, through the pandemic is a good example. Like we've been really timely and really topical about what our audience wants. You know, Will Smith made a show for us. It had over thirty eight million views from his garage. You know, I have been doing my show from here in my office in Venice UM. But we still books Joe biden And and Anthony Fauci on our show, UM really funny show called Apocalypse Goals about you know, two girls, uh,

you know, on the loose during an apocalypse. But like, I think, we've just been very mindful of what our audience wants, and we are very clever and nimble so we can move fast and create content around things that are happening in the world. Well, besides content, we should also announce we should also note that Snap just announced last week some features to the app aimed at not just driving but simplifying vote A registration. So explain how

that works. Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm really proud of the team that built this UM basically, starting in September, you're going to be able to not only register to vote inside Snapchat, UH, you will be able to request a mail in ballot. UM. You will be able to make a plan to vote. UH. These are hugely important things at a time when registering a vote, first of all, is not as easy as people think it is. Ah, it can be really complicated. It turns out, let alone

figure out how to request an absentee ballot. Um Inen. We helped almost half a million people registered a vote UM, and we decided to ramp it up this cycle, UM because the stakes are high, you know, whichever side of the equation you're on, and we want to make it easy for people to get engaged with the world and if you can, you know, use Snapchat to request a ballot,

I mean that we have there. There's there are hundreds of thousands of people turning eighteen in this country every month, and we are right in the palm of their hands. So UM, I would say though the back to are conversation like it just sort of dubtails with our approach to content. We just want to help bring um this generation, you know, into into the political universe and the political conversation and uh, you know, the appropriate, trusted, credible way,

like that's just what we do and how we think. Well, you're also you know, Snap is touching lives in what is probably going to be the issue, the crucial issue as we get towards the election, every vote is going to matter. Malin is going to be absolutely crucial. Do you think that? Is it? To me? It seems undoubted that as we get to November and beyond that this is going to be issue one and everything is going to fade away because this is going to be a

contested election. I could just feel it. Yeah, I mean there. I think the press has actually done a pretty good job in the last week or so of sounding this alarm that the traditional cable news like Election Night in America kind of thing where you can render a verdict very quickly, you know, well relatively like in a few hours, could be in jeopardy. Um. And you know there are

look at New York's twelfth congressional district primary. This didn't get a lot of attention weirdly, um, but they voted, They had their primary in June. It took them six weeks to count the votes. There were like some sixty six thousand ballots were just like disqualified because he didn't have a postmark. The state of New York didn't have enough workers to count the avalanche of ballots that came in.

UM voting is not a federal exercise. It is conducted by county and state election officials all over the country. Is a patchwork of rules and laws. Uh. Several states have expanded vote by mail to the point, like California and Nevada they're sending people ballots directly. But yeah, I was talking to someone who works in labor politics a few weeks ago, and he was he was really worried. Right.

He's he's in the Democratic Coalition and and out there in battleground states trying to do canvassing, getting people registered. And his worry is that the election is closer than it is now, which is entirely possible. And you know, you have these states swing states that are on the margins, and instead of one Push v. Gore, which was a huge thing, you have five to ten Bush vigors in

different states. Because the Trump administration is filing different lawsuits and the Biden campaign is filing lawsuits, and the stuff isn't decided for for many months. So education is huge, Like people need to understand that voting isn't easy, voting by mail isn't easy, and they need to be patient while these votes are counted. Um. The more the press explains the that this could take longer, the less able politicians will be able to demagogue the outcome and say

that it's fraud or it's stolen. Once people start to understand that this is in the typical election, Um, then I think people might feel better about it and it could be a less of a chaotic outcome. Well, that's a lot of red meat for for people like yourself to chew on and your show Good Luck America also should point out your writing as a contributor about politics to Vanity Fair. Looking forward to reading and seeing more of your continued coverage. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Peter,

Thanks and it great to be here. Thank you. This has been another episode of Strictly Business. Tune in next week for another helping of scintillating conversation with media movers and shakers, and please make sure you subscribe to the podcast to hear future episodes. Also leave a review in Apple Podcasts and let us know how we're doing I think, don't t