(Reuters) - U.S. media stocks have taken an indiscriminate beating this week, but many big fund managers still like entertainment conglomerate Walt Disney Co (>> Walt Disney Co) while turning negative for the long term on Discovery Communications (>> Discovery Communications Inc.), owner of several niche television franchises.

Shares of leading media stocks slid again on Thursday as investors sorted winners and losers. Television advertising has been drying up as consumers downsize or eliminate expensive cable TV packages and watch more programs on mobile devices.

The stock decline, fanned by a slew of disappointing financial reports, hurt a number of U.S. funds this week. Portfolio manager Don Yacktman has seen the performance of both his $11.2 billion (7.22 billion pounds) Yacktman Fund and the $7.6 billion Yacktman Focused fund tumble into the 98th percentile of their Morningstar peers.

Along with 7.7 million shares of Viacom Inc (>> Viacom, Inc.) spread between those two funds, Yacktman owns about 30 million shares of Twenty-First Century Fox (>> Twenty-First Century Fox Inc), down about 22 percent for the year. Viacom is off 22 percent this week and down nearly 45 percent over the past 12 months. Yacktman did not respond to a request for comment.

Shares of Disney are off nearly 10 percent this week amid concerns that its leading sports channel franchise ESPN is losing subscribers. Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Iger admitted to "modest losses" during a conference call with analysts and investors this week. But he said cable packages are not dead and ESPN will still be the centerpiece of any offering.

Pound for pound, the $866 million Fidelity Select Multimedia Portfolio has one of the biggest bets on Disney's future, with 24 percent of its assets in the stock at the end of June, fund disclosures show.

As a result, the fund is down 4.2 percent this week, underperforming nearly all of its peers, according to Morningstar Inc. But thanks in part to Disney, the fund's three-year average annual total return of 21.76 percent is better than 83 percent of peers.

Portfolio manager Nidhi Gupta was not available for comment, but earlier this year declared Disney the "clear winner among the content providers."

Like many other fund managers, Gupta has soured on Discovery Communications, hard hit by the consumer shift to watching Internet-based content. Discovery shares are down 7 percent this week and down 29 percent over the past 12 months.

Fund managers began unloading large blocks of Discovery early last year. Fidelity's behemoth Contrafund had a $1 billion stake in Discovery in early 2014. By the end of the year, Will Danoff, manager of the $113 billion fund, had eliminated his position in Discovery, citing disappointing earnings.

By contrast, Danoff's stake in Disney, $2.6 billion at the end of June, has grown to about 2.3 percent of Contrafund's portfolio, up from 1.87 percent in early 2014, fund disclosures show.

(Reporting by Tim McLaughlin in Boston and David Randall in New York; Editing by David Gregorio)

By Tim McLaughlin and David Randall