What to watch
SUNDAY
March 7, 2021
All times Central. Start times can vary based on cable/satellite provider. Confirm times on your on-screen guide.
Bless the Harts FOX, 6:30 p.m.
Jenny (voice of Kristen Wiig) takes over as Mayor Webb’s (guest voice of Jon Hamm) campaign manager for reelection against Betty (voice of Maya Rudolph) and an accomplished dog in the new episode “The Dogchurian Candidate.”
Oprah With Meghan and Harry: A CBS Primetime Special CBS, 7 p.m.
Oprah Winfrey sits down with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, for an intimate conversation in this exclusive primetime special. Winfrey will speak with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, in a wideranging interview, covering everything from royalty, marriage, motherhood and philanthropic work to how she is handling life under intense public pressure. Later, the two are joined by Prince Harry as they speak about their move to the United States and their future hopes and dreams for their expanding family.
Desperate Widows
Lifetime, 7 p.m. Original Film
A recent widow takes what’s left of her family to a commune for moms in hopes of a fresh start, but once there, she uncovers blackmarket human trafficking by the Mommune’s corrupt owner and must fight to keep her and her daughter from becoming the next victims. Stars Justine Eyre, Olivia Stuck, Allison McAtee, Jake B. Miller and Kate Bond.
NBA All-Star Game TNT, 7 p.m. Live
After originally canceling this year’s All-Star Game amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the shortened season, the NBA reversed course and will go forward with the annual
exhibition. Atlanta’s State Farm Arena will be the site for the condensed All-Star weekend, with the skills competitions and East vs. West matchup taking place Sunday.
Bob’s Burgers FOX, 8 p.m.
Bob and Linda (voices of H. Jon Benjamin and John Roberts) are haunted by a lie they told their kids about what happened to their beloved stuffed animal, Wheelie Mammoth, in the new episode “An Incon-wheelie-ent Truth.”
Good Girls
NBC, 9 p.m. Season Premiere
The comedy/drama returns for Season 4.
It follows suburban moms Beth (Christina Hendricks), Ruby (Retta) and Annie (Mae Whitman), who try to solve their various crippling financial troubles by robbing a supermarket in a heist that attracts the attention of a local gang leader, Rio. The stakes get higher this season as the Secret Service closes in on the women’s counterfeit ring. When we last saw Beth, she was struggling to carve out her own criminal path separate from Rio, using her husband’s spa company as a front. Ruby seemed to have salvaged her marriage after a rocky road, but only time will tell if her hidden secrets implode. Annie is focusing on inner love and healing as she takes the journey to rebuild independence.
On Feb. 10, Fox News was in lockstep with other cable news channels and major broadcast networks in presenting more than four hours of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.
But at 5 p.m. Eastern, Fox News pulled away from the most graphic video evidence of violence during the insurrection by pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and switched to its popular daily roundtable show “The Five.”
Most of the panelists dismissed the Democratic impeachment managers’ presentation, defended the former president and moved on to other topics — including the viral Zoom cat lawyer video — despite the historic nature of the events in Washington. Viewers who wanted Fox News journalists’ take on the proceedings had to wait until anchor Bret Baier showed up at the top of the 6 p.m. hour.
The editorial judgment to cut away was met with derision on social media, where the conservativeleaning news network is often hammered by critics. On screen, Juan Williams, the lone liberal on “The Five,” angrily chastised his co-hosts for ignoring the evidence presented.
What played out that day demonstrates the pressure Fox News is under, as the network faces growing scrutiny over its role in supporting Trump and his disinformation claims that many believe helped to fuel the deadly insurrection attempt in the Capitol.
The profit engine of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corp. presents itself as a news network, but it’s often defined by its opinion hosts, such as Sean Hannity, who pay fealty to Trump.
Those followers now have multiple options to feed their fix for rightwing
opinions — some of them far more extreme than what is delivered on Fox News. Satisfying those viewers while also reporting information that does not fit their worldview has become a challenge for an organization that faces vocal detractors on the political center and left, a potentially expensive lawsuit from one of Trump’s baseless voter fraud targets and an increasingly outsize role in the parent company’s financial performance.
“I have friends who don’t watch Fox anymore because they see it as untethered from reality,” said Richard Goodstein, a Washington attorney who has appeared on the channel as a liberal guest.
Giving the benefit of the doubt and often fullthroated support to a president whose lies led to an attempt to overturn an election in turn led to voting software maker Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against the network and three of its hosts.
The suit filed Feb. 4 alleges that Fox News and its hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine
Pirro damaged Smartmatic’s reputation and business by spreading Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election being rigged to elect President Biden. (Fox News and the hosts have filed motions to dismiss the suit, saying the Trump’s claims were newsworthy, even if they were false.)
A more immediate question hanging over Fox News is the same one the Republican party is grappling with: What is the next move for Trump? Just as Republican legislators fear Trump will support primary challengers back home if they take him to task, Fox News has to determine how to navigate his expected reemergence following his acquittal in the second impeachment trial.
The challenges come as Fox News has emerged as the most significant piece of Fox Corp., which slimmed down after selling most of its entertainment assets to the Walt Disney Co. for $71 billion. During the current fiscal year, Fox News is expected to contribute 80% — or more than $2 billion — to Fox Corp.’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation
and amortization, an industry-wide measurement of profitability.
Fox News has been the most-watched cable news channel for 19 consecutive years, thanks to its effective positioning as a right-leaning alternative to other TV news outlets. As the rest of the traditional TV business declined in 2020, the channel’s audience grew. Fox News became the most-watched network in all of cable TV, according to Nielsen.
The network expected an audience falloff once Trump lost the White House, as it had seen viewers tune out after Barack Obama, a Democrat, defeated his Republican opponents in 2008 and 2012.
But Trump remained the main story in the weeks after the 2020 election with his unfounded charges of voter fraud, leading to the insurrection at the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters that killed five people, followed by the second impeachment trial. Depressed Trump supporters tuned out of Fox News during coverage of those events, while the ratings for MSNBC and CNN surged as viewers who don’t habitually watch cable news were tuning in.
Fox News has managed to ride out ratings fluctuations in the past, but it took longer this time. The network has ranked first in viewers since Biden’s inauguration, although it still trails CNN in the 25 to 54 age group important to advertisers.
The dip was significant enough for Fox Corp. Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch to calm the waters. On Feb. 9, Murdoch told financial analysts that the company extended the employment contract of Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott and praised her performance.
Scott took over the operation in 2018 after it had been rocked by sexual harassment scandals and racial discrimination lawsuits related to the reign of the network’s founding chief executive, Roger Ailes. After maintaining the network’s ratings leadership for two years, she is now jiggering the network’s lineup and will add at least two more hours of right-leaning opinion programs, which have always been the most reliable ratings performers.
Murdoch also tried to counter the notion that Fox News has veered too far to one end of the political spectrum.
“We don’t need to go further right,” Murdoch said. “We’ll stick where we are, and we think that’s exactly right and that’s the best thing for the business and for our viewers.”
Despite the younger Murdoch’s assurances, there is a sense among some politicos and people inside Fox News that the network has already moved further right to stave off the insurgence of new outlets that are courting their audience. Even veterans of past Republican administrations, such as Matthew Dowd, who worked for George W. Bush, believe there has been a shift.
“We saw them as conservative and more likely to be more friendly than others, but we never saw them as like, ‘Oh, let’s do Fox because they’re basically a propaganda arm,’ ” Dowd said. “You always thought of it as a conservative outlet, but it was rational conservative.”
A Fox News insider not authorized to speak publicly on the matter said the conservative bent of the network is reflective of where the Republican Party has gone under Trump.
This past year, Fox News saw the rise of a pesky new rival in Newsmax, which kept up a steadfast defense of Trump’s voter fraud claims through President Biden’s inauguration. Last fall, the Boca Raton, Florida-based channel averaged as many as 1 million viewers at 7 p.m. Eastern on some days with host Greg Kelly, who on Trump’s last day in office said, “I miss him already.”
The other right-wing Fox wannabe is the more strident San Diego-based One America News Network, which does not have enough distribution in cable and satellite homes to be measured by Nielsen.
But keeping the core conservative Fox News viewer happy is the company’s primary goal. Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. newspapers the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have been highly critical of Trump’s actions on their editorial pages since he lost the election. Any personal political convictions he has on the matter are not worth alienating fickle TV viewers who could ultimately have an impact on the company’s balance sheet.
“They are not sentimental about their programming decisions,” said Jon Klein, a digital media entrepreneur and former CNN president, of the Murdochs. “They do what they need to do to get an audience.”