CNN Bets News, Not Big Names, Will Capture Crowds at 9 PM

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor The battle for cable-news viewers is coming to March Madness. CNN intends to run a new promo during the heavily watched NCAA men’s basketball tournament that throws a sharp verbal elbow at Fox News Channel and the legal defamation case filed against it by Dominion Voting Systems. The promos will air starting this weekend on TNT, TBS, TruTV and CBS, all of which carry the games under a joint rights agreement held by the owners of those networks, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery, which is also the parent of CNN. Fox News Channel is not mentioned in the promo script, reviewed by Variety, but the references are clear. “What should you expect of a news network?” asks the narrator. “Some bury the truth, while we fight to reveal the facts. The only side we are on is yours.” Viewers see images of CNN correspondents and anchors such as Abby Phillip and Clarissa Ward.

Fox News Channel viewers are less trusting of the cable network in the wake of publicly disclosed text messages and emails from Fox executives and on-air personalities, according to a new survey.  But only 9% of Fox News viewers say they aren’t watching the network as much as they used to, per research provided exclusively to Variety Intelligence Platform by consumer insights specialists Maru Group. (Click to an expanded subscriber version for full results.) A representative for Fox News told VIP+, “There has been no impact to advertising, with no advertisers dropping or pausing.” 

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor When NBC News announced in January that Hallie Jackson, its senior Washington correspondent, would leave the anchoring duties she had held at MSNBC since 2016, some eyebrows rose. But NBC News was chasing something else on the rise: Digital audiences. Since Jackson began anchoring a late-afternoon hour on NBC News Now in December 2021, a growing audience has sought her out. Viewership surged 108% over the course of a year. “You don’t see those numbers in many businesses,” says Janelle Rodriguez, the NBC News executive vice president who oversees the streaming outlet, in an interview. “When you see that level of audience increase, you know you are on to something,” On Monday, Jackson will double her time on her program, “Hallie Jackson Now,” to two hours, which means she will hold forth from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.

John Oliver is having fun with Fox News and its lawsuit with Dominion Voting, again.

If Chelsea Handler had to take a guess as to who would survive for the GOP Presential ticket, it would be Florida governor Ron DeSantis over former President Donald Trump.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor One of the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies is betting that college sports will keep it connected to consumers. AT&T will remain a top-tier sponsor of NCAA athletic events through the 2024-2025 academic year, having signed a deal to extend its pact with the massive college-sports league. AT&T has been an NCAA “corporate champion” since 2001, and unveils the extension just as the NCAA’s 2023 “March Madness” basketball tournament is kicking off.. “We love the audience size,” says Kellyn Kenny, chief marketing and growth officer of AT&T, in an interview, speaking of the basketball championship event. “It does a really nice job of attracting an audience that is fairly diverse — it’s young, it’s GenZ, and has a bunch of business decision makers.”

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Everything seems like it’s going great at Fox Corporation, except for the fact that everything seems like it isn’t. While speaking at an investor conference Thursday, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch praised his family’s decision to sell off a large swath of cable and studio assets to Walt Disney Co. in 2019, a move that left Fox significantly smaller and focused largely on live TV, mainly news and sports. He even brought up a reference to the 1979 comedy “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” in which a small combatant unencumbered with armor or muscle is able to survive a colosseum fight after his larger opponent suffers a heart attack. “We are the little guy,” said Murdoch. “We are going to be the one that survives.”

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Someone has to handle the truth. In the 1992 legal drama, “A Few Good Men,” a senior military commander played by Jack Nicholson is asked over and over if he ordered a “code red,” or an off-the-books dictate that sent underlings scurrying to do something they probably should not have done. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and many of the top executives and anchors at Fox News Channel may feel like they are stuck in a reboot of that film. In a remarkable series of depositions that have been made available from much-scrutinized litigation between voting-technology company Dominion Voting Systems and Fox Corporation, top officers at Fox and its most lucrative subsidiary, Fox News Media, are grilled over whether they have direct responsibility for stories, talent and reporting that airs on Fox News Channel or Fox Business Network. In many instances, the executives say they do not.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Dick’s Sporting Goods is getting ready to play a new game with the NCAA. The Pittsburgh company has been named the college-sports league’s official sporting-goods retailer, a new partnership that will become quickly visible during the NCAA’s “March Madness” basketball tournament and is part of a multi-million dollar deal that will give Dick’s on-court signage and exclusive access to select fan events. Commercials purchased in game inventory from CBS Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, which televise the March Madness games, are a strong element of the deal. Dick’s also plans to have a presence at NCAA women’s Final Four Open Practices, which has not had an active on-site sponsor in the past. Dick’s plans to invest in media around the women’s basketball tournament on Disney’s ESPN.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Max Meyers has at least one firm rule about his new CNBC program, and it might surprise some of the business-news outlet’s die-hards. “I told everyone, ‘No earnings,’” says Meyers, a veteran producer at the NBCUniversal-backed cable network. “I don’t want to hear that.” No net income on CNBC? Such a dictate would be anathema on “Squawk Box,” the morning-news program that Meyers previously ran, but it might just stick on “Last Call,” a new 7 p.m. effort from CNBC executives that aims to keep business-news aficionados hanging out with the network until later in the evening. Over the past week, anchor Brian Sullivan, who is moving from a 5 a.m. roost on “Worldwide Exchange” to anchor the new evening show, has held forth on everything from Tesla to Salesforce during rehearsals, ready to give late-breaking news to CNBC’s market faithful.

A huge release of text messages, emails and deposition transcripts dropped today in the Dominion vs. Fox litigation sheds further light on the scramble among Fox News personalities and Fox Corp. executives to respond to the backlash in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and then the repercussions after the attack on the Capitol on January 6th.

The New York Times examined the response of those networks to the private messages that were made public in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. According to the NY Times findings, only four publications – Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, the Washington Examiner and the Western Journal – mentioned the suit in some way. However, none of them worked the Fox employees’ private comments into their coverage.

filing earlier this month: That top hosts including Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo were privately horrified that their network was pushing Trump’s “stolen election” narrative – but went on-air with it anyway.“Is there really that much going on at two in the afternoon on Fox News that you can’t cover him live?” the popular “War Room” podcaster asked the crowd. “They don’t respect you, read the depositions.

Fox News dominated its rivals in February viewership and landed the top ten shows in total viewers and a key demographic.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor FX chief John Landgraf and ABC programming head Simran Sethi will expand their duties under an executive shuffle at Disney’s TV operations, one of the first big moves under Dana Walden, who was assigned responsibility for the company’s TV networks after Bob Iger returned as Disney’s CEO. Landgraf will take oversight of National Geographic as well as Onyx Collective, the production unit devoted to projects from communities of color and underrepresented groups. Sethi, meanwhile, will oversee programming and development for both ABC and Freeform. She will continue to report to Craig Erwich, president, Disney Television Group. The moves comes as Tara Duncan, who had been supervising programming for both Onyx Collective and Freeform, will devote her attention solely to Onyx, freeing up the programming duties for Sethi, who had a previous tenure at the cable network.

filing earlier this month: That top hosts, including Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo were privately horrified that their network was pushing Donald Trump’s “stolen election” narrative – but went ahead with it anyway.“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch told the Superior Court of the state of Delaware, according to the filing.The documents revealed that top executives also reacted with incredulity – bordering on contempt – to various fictitious allegations about Dominion, including that a secret algorithm in its voting machines allowed ballots to be switched, and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help its former president, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.“Executives at all levels of Fox … knowingly opened Fox’s airwaves to false conspiracy theories about Dominion,” the filing states.Murdoch also said in his testimony that it was wrong for Fox hosts to “endorse” lies if they knew them not to be true: “Fox has a role in making sure people can agree on a basic set of facts,” he said last month. “Yes.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Warner Bros. Discovery continued to work on making all its various pieces, merged together last year, into a cohesive whole. The New York owner of the TNT and TBS cable networks, the HBO Max streaming service and the Warner Bros. production studio reported a net loss of $2.1 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter after the company wrote down $1.85 billion in assets and faced nearly $1.2 billion in restructuring expenses. Revenue fell 9%, excluding the results of foreign exchange, and the company saw ad sales decrease 14% as its TV networks, even as it worked to add subscribers to its HBO Max and Discovery+ streaming outlets.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Norah O”Donnell is taking the venerable “CBS Evening News” out of its usual dock in Washington, D.C. and steering it into more challenging waters. O’Donnell will anchor both the Thursday and Friday broadcast’s of the venerable evening-news program live from the U.S.S Nimitz, a U.S. aircraft carrier which has been operating in the South China Sea. She will report on China’s close relationship with Russia, and the growing tensions between the U.S. and China over Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Chinese spy balloon — all as part of offering perspective and an examination of national-security developments woven around the first anniversary of Russia’s incursion against Ukraine.  A team of CBS News correspondents will also offer context and reporting around the war.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor CNN’s morning show isn’t peeling away from Don Lemon. The anchor will return to “CNN This Morning” on Wednesday, despite delivering a set of controversial remarks last week, the latest maneuver in what has become a more difficult than expected effort by the Warner Bros Discovery-backed outlet to shake up its programming. “I sat down with Don and had a frank and meaningful conversation. He has agreed to participate in formal training, as well as continuing to listen and learn. We take this situation very seriously,” CNN CEO Chris Licht said in a memo Monday night. “It is important to me that CNN balances accountability with fostering a culture in which people can own, learn and grow from their mistakes. To that end, Don will return to CNN This Morning on Wednesday.”

John Oliver returned with Last Week Tonight after a three-month hiatus and it wasn’t long before he started taking swipes at Fox News.