Good morning. 🇺🇸 Today is the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both President Donald Trump and Joe Biden will visit Shanksville, Penn., the site where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field.

📸 Today on CNBC's Squawk Box: Andrew Ross Sorkin talks to Instagram's Adam Mosseri at 8 a.m. ET.

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Jeff Zucker | WaPo/Getty

📺 Moving the Market

Jeff Zucker, Michael Cohen and the business of news

This week, while mainstream media was rightly focused on Bob Woodward's new revelations about President Donald Trump, Fox News' Tucker Carlson revealed a recording of a 2016 phone call between former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN (where, I should note, I worked from 2015-2018).

• The recording, which took place hours before a March 10, 2016, CNN Republican debate, features Zucker complimenting Trump, offering debate advice and even telling Cohen that he wanted to offer Trump his own CNN show if and when he lost the primary. This, of course, was before Zucker decided to position CNN as anti-Trump.

The revelations, which feed into a larger Trump-Zucker saga dating back decades, are either morally reprehensible or merely unfortunate depending on who you ask. Concerned citizens who watch cable news and tweet about politics will see foul play. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple accused Zucker of "ethical depravity."

• Meanwhile, more than a few news media executives, producers and insiders will — privately, off-the-record, between us — tell you that this is just how the game works. News is a business. It's transactional. People get chummy and make promises they may or may not keep.

News is a business, with all the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that entails. But it also has the distinction of being a business that markets itself by promising things — integrity, transparency, fairness — that make the behind-the-scenes machinations especially unseemly to the average consumer (and to many employees).

• This is how Carlson, who has privately advised Trump and works for Fox News, a network that is unabashedly cozy with the president, is still able to accuse Zucker of coziness and make it stick. Because political-media coziness isn't part of the CNN brand.

• But coziness, like it or not, is a part of the business. It's how many reporters cultivate sources, how producers and bookers land big interviews and, yes, how some executives foster relationships that can, at times, be mutually beneficial. (Don't shoot the messenger).

• This is not to say that some news executives don't believe in integrity, transparency and all the other things they market — many do. But it's also important to understand that there's a business side to this business, one preoccupied with ratings and ad sales and "integrity" as a marketing slogan, and it tests the sacrosanct ideals of the Fourth Estate almost every single day.

No one needed a private recording to know that Zucker is relentlessly focused on the business side of the news. He has been quite public about his focus on the ratings and his willingness to cater to the interests of his audience. Many of his fellow cable news executives share that obsession; he's just candid about it.

• What the recording does show, however, is that in March of 2016, after nine months of Trump's divisive rhetoric about minorities, immigrants, women and the media — rhetoric that CNN now claims to abhor — Zucker was still willing to float the idea of giving Trump his own CNN show.

Maybe you think that's depraved. Maybe you think it's just savvy, or cutthroat. As for what Jeff Zucker thinks, I don't know. He didn't respond to a request for comment.

🦊 Fox post Trump 🦊

Fox Corp. chief Lachlan Murdoch said Thursday that Fox News will continue to thrive even if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, citing the network's enduring success through administrations Republican and Democratic.

Murdoch, who was speaking at a Bank of America conference, was not asked about Fox News programming, but said advertising demand on the channel is strong.

Jack Dorsey | Bloomberg/Getty

🌁 Big in the Bay

Jack Dorsey preps for more Trump showdowns

Twitter has expanded its rules against misleading information about voting and elections, a challenge to President Trump and his attacks on mail-in ballots that will likely lead to more standoffs between the social media firm and the White House, our colleague David Ingram reports.

• Twitter said Thursday that it would label or force users to remove tweets that "may suppress participation or mislead people about when, where, or how to participate in a civic process” such as voting.

• It will also add fact-check labels or hide tweets with "false or misleading information that causes confusion" about election rules or with "unverified information about election rigging."

The big picture: Twitter "has already been on a collision course with Trump over the president’s opposition to mail-in or absentee ballots. ... The update... signals a potentially even more aggressive stance by the San Francisco-based tech company less than two months before the November election."

President Trump | Mandel Ngan/Getty

🌁 Big in the Beltway

Microsoft warns of Russian, Chinese cyberattacks

Hackers working for Russia, China and Iran have recently escalated their attacks around the U.S. presidential race, Microsoft said Thursday. The findings come as the White House and the Department of Homeland Security face accusations that they sought to downplay such threats in order to protect the president.

• Russian hackers have "attacked more than 200 organizations including political campaigns, advocacy groups, parties and political consultants,' Microsoft said. Chinese hackers had targeted the Biden campaign, while Iranian hackers had attacked the Trump campaign.

The big picture: "Firms like Microsoft and Google, because they sit atop global networks, have a front-seat view of suspicious activity," NYT's David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth report. "The result, inevitably, is a tumble of reports from the private sector, which government intelligence officials will be forced to assess."

Market Links

• Laurene Powell Jobs slams President Trump (TI)

• Megyn Kelly launches her own media venture (WSJ)

• Eric Shanks deals with a Skip Bayless dust-up (Deadline)

• Tom Ley & Co. launch their sports news site (Defector)

• Lorne Michaels will bring back 'SNL' (NBC)

Michael Barbaro | NBC/Getty

🎧 Moving Manhattan

NYT's 'Daily' claims 4 million daily downloads

The New York Times' "The Daily," the podcast hosted by Michael Barbaro, now averages 4 million downloads per day, doubling its audience from a year and a half ago, the Times said at the IAB Podcast Upfront on Thursday.

• The big picture: The Daily' is "now becoming a very major news platform," Barbaro said during the event, per CNN's Kerry Flynn. "It's become as big, if you do the math, as primetime Fox News.'"

Tyler Blevins | NBC/Getty

🎮 Leading the Leagues

Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, comes back to Twitch

Tyler Blevins, the Fortnite star better known as Ninja, says he will once agains stream exclusively on Amazon's Twitch, one year after decamping to Microsoft's Mixer for a deal reportedly worth $20 million to $30 million. (Mixer shut down in June).

• The big picture: Blevins' move is a landmark decision in the gaming world that further solidifies Amazon's power over the industry. Twitch is the largest game platform in the world with 17.5 million average daily active viewers, and Blevins' has an audience of 15 million followers there.

The backstory: "The 29-year-old... began playing... professionally in his teens... before deciding to dedicate his time to live streaming his gameplay for fans on Twitch [where he] quickly amassed more than 14 million followers," THR's Natalie Jarvey reports.

• "In summer 2019, he shocked the gaming community when he announced that he was leaving Twitch for Mixer, an upstart platform owned by Microsoft that wooed Blevins and several other top streamers as it looked to build its standing among gamers."

• "Though Mixer’s audience grew over the last year... it wasn’t enough for the platform to keep pace with rivals Twitch, YouTube Gaming and Facebook Gaming. In June, Microsoft announced that it was shutting down Mixer, making Blevins a free agent."

What's next: "The terms of the multiyear deal between Mr. Blevins and Twitch were unclear," NYT's Kellen Browning reports, "but the move [is] a win for the platform."