No Hard Times In Media For Head Honchos and Big Cheeses

Here’s a story that’s sure to warm your unemployed heart. From the New York Times:

The media industry may be going through some rough times, with the landscape changing day to day, but at least one aspect is business as usual: big paydays for the people at the top.

Top executives at the country’s largest media companies continued to reel in multimillion-dollar pay packages in 2009, a year of widespread cost-cutting throughout the industry. In several cases, the packages even increased from the year before.

And just who are the titans and captains of industry making out like banditos in this bad business climate?

At the top of the list is Leslie Moonves, chief executive of the CBS Corporation, whose pay package in 2009 totaled almost $43 million, more than twice what he made in 2008, according to an analysis by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm.

Not to mention Viacom chairman Philippe Dauman ($34 million) and his boss, Sumner Redstone ($33 million). Most of the boodle came in the form of performance bonuses:

Despite the hard times at many media companies and the uncertainty of maintaining revenue in the digital future, investors did not shy away last year. The stock of CBS jumped 74 percent in 2009, and Viacom’s stock rose 56 percent.

In the case of many of the media executives, including Mr. Dauman at Viacom, most of the compensation is based on the company’s performance. Mr. Dauman’s base salary in 2009, $2.5 million, was unchanged from the year before.

To its credit, the Times story also takes a look at its own executives:

At The New York Times, Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive, was paid $4.9 million in 2009, 26 percent more than the year before, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman, made $4.8 million, a 171 percent increase.

As usual in these kinds of stories, the Times found some “analysts” to say that huge “compensation packages” aren’t so bad, since they reflect the companies’ need to hang on to their best execs during tough times.

“When you have an industry going through so much tumult, it puts upward pressure on pay because so many people are moving around,” said Don Delves, the president of the Delves Group, a compensation consulting firm in Chicago. “People are looking around a lot, people are moving around and there’s a concern about losing talent.”

Maybe Delves should talk to this guy. He only made a crummy five and a half mil last year:

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