Media teams put together for election evening disinformation | Invesloan.com

Good morning. In today’s news:

• Halloween tech shock on markets

• Elon Musk in talks with investors over xAI

• US Space Force head warns about China

As we enter the final weekend before the US election, media groups are finalising plans to combat disinformation around the outcome of what polls suggest is one of the most closely fought White House races for a generation.

Associated Press, which has been tallying the votes for US elections since 1848, was “prepared for misinformation around our race calls”, said Washington bureau chief Anna Johnson.

CNN will deploy a “robust team” of reporters to battleground states to track the casting of ballots, said political director David Chalian, while ABC has beefed up a “ballot watch team” to monitor vote counts across the country.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, the most-watched US cable news channel in the country, has invested in technology to sharpen its graphics to help viewers visualise how close various vote counts are.

In 2020, Fox was the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden — a move that infuriated supporters of Donald Trump. The former president has continued to sow doubt in US election processes, even though his challenges to the 2020 election results were not backed by evidence.

However, US news groups are preparing for an election night that may not result in a clear winner. In 2020, it took four days for the media to declare that Biden had defeated Trump, leaving Americans in suspense as they waited for votes to be counted in Pennsylvania.

Arnon Mishkin, who leads the Fox News “decision desk”, said he found it difficult to see either candidate winning this election without taking Pennsylvania, making it crucial to the outcome again.

Mishkin said the swing state had made improvements to its vote counting procedures since 2020 but was “still counting in the same process” and predicted the result would not be clear until Friday or Saturday next week. Read more on the media groups’ election night preparations, and Aiden Reiter’s report from Pennsylvania’s election 2024 ground zero where voters are shifting their views.

And here’s more of our election coverage and the election poll tracker latest:

Here’s what I’m keeping tabs on today and over the weekend:

• Economic data: Deadly hurricanes and the Boeing strike could result in one of the worst jobs reports of Joe Biden’s presidency today. The US also has its manufacturing purchasing managers’ index, as does Canada.

• Companies: Chevron, ExxonMobil and T Rowe Price report results.

Experts led by Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf will discuss their predictions for the world in 2025 in a virtual event on December 11. Register today.

Five more top stories

1. US stocks gave up all of their gains for October as a sell-off in tech heavyweights yesterday produced Wall Street’s worst daily drop in almost two months. In the final trading session of the month, the S&P 500 ended down 1.9 per cent while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed 2.8 per cent lower. Here’s more on the final trading session of October and a round-up of last night’s results.

2. Elon Musk is in talks with some of the largest investors in the Middle East about a fundraising for his artificial intelligence start-up that could roughly double the one-year-old company’s valuation to $45bn. xAI is in early talks with new and existing investors, according to six people with knowledge of the conversations.

3. Global oil prices rose after a top commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards vowed that Tehran would deliver a harsh response to last week’s Israeli strikes on the Islamic republic, sparking fears of further escalation in the region. Read more of Major General Hossein Salami’s comments.

4. China is putting military capabilities into space at a “mind-boggling” pace, the chief of the US Space Force has warned. General Chance Saltzman, who was on tour in Europe to encourage co-operation between allies to counter China and Russia, said the variety of space weapons and speed at which Beijing was creating them were “very threatening”.

5. Exclusive: BDO has been ordered to pay more than $5mn in damages to Jay-Z’s former tax adviser, who said he was unfairly dismissed for disclosing confidential information to celebrity clients who accused a firm employee of stealing money. Stephen Foley has more details.

How well did you keep up with the news this week? Take our quiz.

News in-depth

German executives have warned that high levels of sick leave are damaging the competitiveness of Europe’s largest economy. Workers missed an average of 19.4 days because of illness last year, and the trend is likely to continue upward. One business leader said the labour force had become “too spoilt and too self-confident”, while another called Germany “the sick man of Europe”.

We’re also reading . . . 

• Trump’s tariffs: Trading partners should not blame him for attempting to remedy the problems they have caused, writes Robert Lighthizer, who served as the US trade representative under Trump.

• Murky numbers: Can we trust official statistics? Soumaya Keynes explores how data gaps are affecting policymaking and shaping our view of the economy.

• Letter from Beirut: When will the war end? Will it be the last one? Kim Ghattas writes about the many questions facing those who call the city home as Israeli bombs fall around them.

Chart of the day

A sell-off in UK government bonds intensified yesterday, as investor worried about the additional debt in chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget, pushing borrowing costs to their highest level of the year. The pound also fell to its lowest level against the dollar for two months.

Take a break from the news

Here are our six films to watch this week, including Anora. Mikey Madison is an Oscar shoo-in with her bristlingly real performance as a strip-club dancer in this frantic anti-Cinderella story, our film critic Danny Leigh writes.