V Spehar offers “alternative to legacy media” with ‘Election Night Pizza Party’

If the anxiety induced by tonight’s election results makes you want to hide under the desk for safety, then V Spehar has a show for you. Spehar, the creator and pundit who hosts Under the Desk News, is going live across multiple platforms with a November 5 special called Election Night Pizza Party.

Spehar will appeal to their Millennial and Gen Z fans by offering “graphs without context,” “digestible explainers,” and “key updates,” according to a logline emailed to Tubefilter.

The synopsis describes Pizza Party as Spehar’s “alternative to legacy media.” Rather than delivering the staid election night special viewers might be used to, the Under the Desk host is invoking concepts like “brain rot media” and nostalgia, both of which are compatible with their target audience. The goal is to create a “high school civics class for the scroll generation.”

Though Spehar’s goal is to update legacy media’s election night format, their special will be a high-value production worthy of a TV network. Special guests — including influencers and other “notable figures” — will visit a studio space in Brooklyn. From that location, Spehar and their “deep crew” will broadcast the Pizza Party across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and even Substack, where Spehar just launched their publication two weeks ago.

If you’d rather get your election stream directly from Tubefilter (weird flex, but we’re honored), we’ll drop in the Pizza Party embed below. The YouTube version of the stream has already gone public:

Pizza Party is the culmination of the campaign season that has been dubbed the “influencer election.” Creators have had more access to political candidates than ever before, with some of them even elbowing past traditional journalists

at the Democratic National Convention. Spehar, who has become TikTok’s top newscaster, is a part of that paradigm shift. They are one of the individuals who was invited to the White House as part of the Biden Administration’s overtures to the creator community.

The rise of influencers-as-political-pundits has opened up dialogues between politicians and young voters, but that movement has also raised questions about the motives of newscasters who are driven by social metrics rather than traditional journalistic ethics. In the weeks leading up to the election, political channels on Twitch have descended into factionalism. Streamers like Hasan Piker have been so fiery that they’ve drawn reproach from members of Congress. The recent reveal of a dispute between the Kamala Harris campaign and TikToker Kareem Rahma served as another reminder of the friction that exists between idealistic creators and entrenched power structures.

That’s where Spehar comes in. Their even-handed approach makes them a straight shooter in a landscape filled with bias, partisanship, and misinformation. If you’re worried that those factors will overwhelm your election night viewing, give the Pizza Party a try. Otherwise, there are plenty of other political broadcasts you can check out across the streaming landscape. Brian Williams will host an election special for Amazon Prime Video, but as far as I know, Spehar has never lied about their coverage, so I’m going with them.