Friday, May 27, 2011

Opinion: The Media Captures the Greed Zone

From Charles Warner's blog:
The Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO compensation survey shows that half of the top 10 and top 12 most highly compensated CEOs are in the media, replacing Wall Street and financial services sector CEOs as the most outrageously overpaid in America.

The top six of the top 12 in 2010 were: Viacom’s Phillip Dauman ($84.32 million) at #1, CBS’s Les Moonves ($58.88 million) at #3, Direct TV’s Michael White ($32.64 million at #5, Walt Disney’ Robert Iger ($27.22 million) at #8, Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes ($26.01 million) at #10, and Comcast’s Brian Roberts ($24.9 million) at #12....

What did the media CEOs do in 2010 to earn their unconscionably high compensation ? Well, they didn’t cause a financial meltdown, but they certainly didn’t help us get out of the recession with any notable public service activity, enlightening news coverage that helped bring to justice anyone guilty of fraud, help explain the meltdown, or create massive jobs...

Like the Wall Street moguls of 2007, the media moguls of 2010 think they are smarter than everyone else and that regulators are lazy, stupid, and in their pockets. Programming is worse in 2010 than it was in 2007, e.g. “Jersey Shore,” TV and cable viewing is down as viewers switch to mobile devices, and the FCC approved the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. Shortly after the merger one of the FCC commissioners who voted to approve it went to work as a high-paid lobbyist for Comcastin Welcome to the pocket.
Read More.

Charles Warner teaches media management, media sales, media economics, and media ethics at The New School and Strategic Analysis at NYU’s Stern School of Business in New York.  He is an active management and marketing consultant and trainer and is a Senior Advisor to transformational urban education startup Blue Engine. He is also an active blogger at MediaCurmudgeon.com and for Jack Myers Media Biz Bloggers.  Charlie is the Goldenson Chair Emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is a volunteer in the Family Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Until Charlie retired in January, 2002, he was a Vice President in AOL’s Interactive Marketing division.  In 1998, Bob Pittman, then President of AOL, hired Charlie its Interactive marketing division.  In the fall of 1999 Sales & Marketing Management magazine ranked AOL number ten in its list of the 25 best sales organizations in America—the first media company to make the list.

No comments:

Post a Comment