newsmakers

newsmakers

CBS shifts schedule to boost ratings for ‘Extant’

NEW YORK

“Extant” is getting a kick-start from CBS to try to improve its ratings less than a month into its run.

Starting today, CBS is moving the drama starring Halle Berry back an hour, to 10 p.m., so that it follows “Criminal Minds.” The hope is that the long-running procedural will provide a more-compatible lead-in than “Big Brother,” which airs at 8 p.m.

“Extant” had just under 6.5 million viewers last Wednesday, the Nielsen Co. said. That was enough to make Nielsen’s top 10 for the week, and CBS says “Extant” picks up significant time-shifted viewership. But it’s not the big splash that TV’s most popular network was expecting for its highest-profile new drama of the summer, which was beaten last week by reruns of two “NCIS” dramas.

CBS won the week with an average of 5.4 million viewers. Led by two airings of “America’s Got Talent,” easily the week’s most-popular program, NBC averaged 5.2 million viewers. ABC had 3.9 million, Univision had 3.2 million, Fox had 2.8 million, Telemundo had 1.3 million and ION Television had 1.2 million.

Ventura awarded $1.8M in defamation case

ST. PAUL, Minn.

A jury awarded former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura $1.8 million Tuesday in his lawsuit against the estate of “American Sniper” author Chris Kyle.

On the sixth day of deliberations, the federal jury decided that the author of the 2012 best-selling book defamed Ventura in its description of a bar fight in California in 2006. Kyle, regarded as the deadliest military sniper in U.S. history, wrote that he decked a man whom he later identified as Ventura after the man purportedly said the Navy SEALs “deserve to lose a few.”

Ventura testified that Kyle fabricated the passage about punching him. Kyle said in testimony videotaped before his death last year that his story was accurate.

Legal experts had said Ventura, a former Navy SEAL, had to clear a high legal bar to win, since as a public figure, he had to prove actual malice. According to the jury instructions, Ventura had to prove with “clear and convincing evidence” that Kyle either knew or believed what he wrote was untrue, or that he harbored serious doubts about its truth.

Neither Ventura nor Kyle’s widow, Taya Kyle, who is the executor of his estate, were on hand for the verdict.

Lawyers for sex-abuse accuser want out

HONOLULU

Lawyers for a former child model accusing “X-Men” director Bryan Singer of sex abuse said Tuesday they want to get off the case because their relationship with the accuser has deteriorated.

Attorneys Jeff Herman and Mark Gallagher filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Honolulu asking to withdraw as counsel for Michael Egan III. They say they no longer talk to Egan except through a new lawyer.

Egan, now 31, accuses Singer in a lawsuit of sexually abusing him during trips to Hawaii when he was 17 in 1999. Singer has denied the allegations.

Associated Press