“The Sunday NFC package has been the most watched NFL package for the past 16 years. Our NFC coverage is an important foundation for the Fox Network and strategically aligns with our local stations, where we own and operate the Fox affiliate in 14 of the 16 NFC markets,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch told analysts.

Fox Corp. beat Wall Street analysts’ forecasts for its fiscal third quarter, with results that reflected difficult comparisons with the Super Bowl period a year earlier. Earnings per share came in at 96 cents during the period ending March 31, well ahead of analysts’ consensus for 58 cents. Total revenue reached $3.22 billion, about $100 million ahead of the Street but down from $3.44 billion in the same quarter in 2020. Affiliate revenue increased 10%, powered by an 18% gain in the Television unit.

Craig Hunegs is leaving Disney. The President of Entertainment at Walt Disney Television has decided to step down six months after a major restructure at the company. The Warner Bros. veteran joined Disney in 2019 following the Mouse House’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, and he was to serve as a layer between Dana Walden and the heads of the various Disney-owned TV studios.

EVP-CFO Lucy Rutishauser: “If you adjust for the impact of the Super Bowl moving this year to CBS from Fox last year, core advertising results for the first quarter would have been up low-single-digits compared to a year ago,” she told analysts. President-CEO Chris Ripley added: “We’ve been very, very happy with what we’ve seen on [2Q] core advertising. It’s been a great bounce back for the economy overall.”

The social network’s quasi-independent Oversight Board has voted to uphold his ban from the platform after his account was suspended four months ago for inciting violence that led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But the board said Facebook must reassess the penalty because it imposed it “indefinitely.”

CBS’s NCIS drew 9.3 million total viewers and a 0.8 demo rating, rebounding from last week’s series lows and leading Tuesday in both measures.

Twitter is acquiring Scroll, a subscription service that removes ads from participating news sites. Scroll, which charges $5 per month, is going into private beta with Twitter in preparation for being incorporated in a broader subscription service later this year, Scroll CEO Tony Haile said in a blog post.

Telemundo is forming a new studio that will exclusively cater to the growing need for Spanish-language content on streaming platforms, including the in-house Peacock. The Miami-based Telemundo Streaming Studios will be under Telemundo Global Studios, led by president Marcos Santana. Santana will oversee all scripted programming for the Telemundo linear TV network as well as streaming development.

Following Alex Trebek’s death, a parade of replacements seem to be battling for the soul of the game — and the state of knowledge itself.

The decrease to $1.5 billion comes from lower political ad revenue. Core revenues, which excludes political revenues, totaled $367 million, an increase of 3% versus $358 million in the first quarter of 2020, benefiting from more local sports games taking place in the quarter compared to the same period a year ago.

It’s not every day that television gets a new ad category. It’s even less common for a new category to become a golden goose. Taboo until a 2018 Supreme Court verdict, online sports betting isn’t technically a new ad category, but with just over two years of a track record, few would challenge its advertising status as a golden goose, especially within the local TV industry.

Former President Trump has rolled out a new tool to communicate with his supporters in lieu of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which banned his accounts. Trump's platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” features videos from the former president and statements from his leadership PAC, which have been sent out over email for several weeks.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office has given up its fight to defend a law that would have required cable TV providers to give subscribers the option of purchasing access to individual cable channels rather than bundled packages. Maine lawmakers passed the first-of-its-kind measure in 2019, but cable companies quickly challenged it in federal court. They argued in part that the law violated their First Amendment rights by infringing on the “editorial discretion” of programmers and cable operators.

CBS was the most-watched network in primetime last week, averaging 4.8 million viewers. ABC had 3.2 million, NBC had 2.9 million, Fox had 2.1 million, Univision had 1.2 million, Ion Television had 1 million and Telemundo had 920,000. Fox News Channel led the cable networks, averaging 2.2 million viewers in prime time. ESPN had 2.04 million, MSNBC had 1.59 million, HGTV had 1.3 million and CNN had 1.1 million.

A panel at TVNewsCheck’s June 9 virtual conference, Streaming News 2021, will detail the most effective ways of monetizing streaming news content with executives from Disney Advertising Sales, The E.W. Scripps Co., Cox Media Group and CBC. Register here.

Byron Allen, founder, chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group and The Weather Group, will continue his crusade to win equity and inclusion for Black-owned media in the world of advertising by headlining  the first Black-Owned Media Upfront. The event, set for May 11 and 12 from noon to 2:30 p.m. ET, will turn a spotlight on the programming and audiences of his companies and others involved in the movement. Register here to participate.

Are you organized, entrepreneurial and completely committed to consultative selling? If so, we’d like to meet with you to see if you will fit into our small, highly accomplished team.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings in Memphis for a media sales consultant and a digital sales coordinator, and an opening for a sales manager in Minneapolis.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a lead broadcast engineer in Chicago and a chief engineer in Savannah, Ga.

Executives from Tegna, Sinclair, NBCU stations and Hearst will evaluate the industry’s progress towards automating key elements of the spot TV buying and selling process in a TVNewsCheck Working Lunch webinar on May 19. Register here.

A May 6 TVNewsCheck webinar featuring executives from WarnerMedia, Sinclair, Hearst and LTN Global will spotlight how companies are changing the way they manage their content and their archives and how AI and the cloud are figuring into their workflows or plans. Register here.