When an executive runs a company whose success depends on stars whether they are richly rewarded TV news anchors or generously compensated movie idols it is only fitting that the boss is paid, well, like a star.
Call it the Katie Couric Syndrome.
That's one take-away from a Los Angeles Times survey of compensation packages of media and entertainment company executives. While the nation's CEOs in general typically saw their earnings slip in 2009, the men and they're all men at the top of the conglomerates that operate the TV networks, movie studios, cable systems and other outposts of the media world continued to command pay packages on par with, and in some cases far higher than, A-list actors.
Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger collected a package worth nearly $24 million for 2009. Philippe Dauman, who manages Viacom Inc., which includes the MTV networks, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, got an almost 22% raise to $34 million. CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves' pay more than doubled to $43.2 million. News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch topped $22 million, and Time Warner Inc.'s Jeffrey Bewkes received nearly $20 million.
“The explanation you hear for entertainment company CEOs is that they have a lot of people in their company like Katie Couric who get paid these high salaries, and the CEO thinks, 'I run the company, why should I get paid less?' “ said Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library. (CBS pays Couric about $15 million a year.)
That might have been OK a decade ago during the gravy-train years of the entertainment industry, when it seemed there could never be enough movies or TV shows to feed the “content" pipeline.
But for the last two years the content business has been under assault.
Media companies have laid off thousands of employees, cut TV and movie production budgets and crunched news divisions as the economic moorings of their businesses were eroded by declining DVD sales, a slowdown in advertising and the migration of viewers to the Internet and other forms of entertainment.
Median compensation in 2009 for CEOs of 342 companies in the S&P 500 fell 8% from the previous year to $7.5 million, according to a survey by the Northern California executive compensation research firm Equilar. It was the second year in a row that overall compensation dropped.
By comparison, full-year median compensation for executives managing the companies included in the Times survey was $15.9 million in 2009 substantially higher than the median of, for example, healthcare company CEOs, which Equilar estimates was $10.5 million last year.
Media companies that are still run like family businesses hand out some of the biggest paychecks.
Murdoch, for example, received the highest base salary among the media chiefs $8.1 million which means the 79-year-old mogul is guaranteed at least that much even if his company has a terrible year. Corporate governance experts frown on such arrangements, preferring to see executive pay tied more closely to a company's performance.
“The base salaries at News Corp. are quite obscene, really," said Hodgson. He noted the average base salary for S&P 500 chiefs was “just over $1 million" annually.
