Couric’s Salary Is More Than The Annual Budgets of NPR’s Two Top News Shows
At the end of today’s Good Morning America story on Gaddafi’s tent, anchor Diane Sawyer observed, “I’ve been in Gaddafi’s tent. In Libya. And it’s perfumed, you should know.”
I guess that’s why we pay her the big bucks. And perhaps that’s what’s wrong with television news, says Michael Massing:
While doing some recent research on the news business, I came upon this remarkable fact: Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.
This is not a new development, of course. It’s been unfolding since 1986, when billionaire Laurence Tisch bought CBS and eviscerated its news division in order to boost profits. (For a sharp, first-hand account of this process, see Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, The Business of News, and the Danger to Us All, by former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton.) But the issue seems worth revisiting in light of the recent naming of Diane Sawyer to replace Charlie Gibson as the anchor of ABC’s World News. We don’t yet know how much Sawyer is going to be paid, but it will no doubt surpass Gibson’s current estimated salary of $8 million. Sawyer will thus be perpetuating the corrosive, top-heavy system of the network news.
Back when Couric rose to her anchor slot, I had high hopes. She’s a talented woman. I quoted former ABC News producer Paul Friedman’s call for CBS News execs to take advantage of those talents and change the evening news format:
Summarize the news of the day in five minutes or so; spend a big chunk of time—10 minutes or so—on covering one really good story; and give people even more to think about by ending with opinion.
Not only did those CBS execs not listen, when Friedman went on to become Couric’s boss, he ignored his own advice!
But that’s not the focus of Massing’s story. While in passing he mentions that “the networks are in a death spiral, yet they keep airing the same tired product,” his subtitled main concern is Why can’t the print press treat TV news as news?
With that he runs through the fawning celebrity treatment our esteemed print media is giving Sawyer’s impending ascension to the anchor chair. It’s an insightful skewering of how self-important market-driven journalism can blithely fail to ask the right questions:
At a time when the obscene executive pay levels at places like Goldman Sachs and AIG are stoking anger, shouldn’t the same be true for ABC, CBS, and NBC?
Yes!
Here I detail why I don’t want or need big media as it is constructed today. Here my answer to how the newspaper can will survive. When the broadcast networks go down in flames, as they surely will, don’t look to me for crying. (Instead I may dread the phoenix that rises from those ashes.) They all do the same stories in the same way at the same time… and spend a wasteful fortune on it.
As for Sawyer — like Couric, incredibly talented — Jack Shafer suggested in Slate:
If you really want to improve World News, if you really want to make an indelible mark on journalism, turn down the job and persuade ABC News to divert the millions it ordinarily pays its anchor and spend it on 50 or 80 additional reporters to break stories.
Her celebrity has eclipsed her journalism.
Via Romenesko. For those of you who clicked the headline looking for more on Katie, here we learn that for her salary CBS “could hire 100 reporters and producers to, you know, report the news.”
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17 Responses to “Couric’s Salary Is More Than The Annual Budgets of NPR’s Two Top News Shows”
And now you know why the media is so conservative…
We must tap this goldmine.
Immediately raise taxes three fold on TV advertising spots. No four fold…..
Increase NPR's budget by thrice and put the rest into a Healthcare public option.
Have Rupert Murdoch dragged into the street and caned with a rattan cane…sell tickets and pay-per-view time. Proceeds to Frontline.
It's not that Couric gets paid so much as it is that Lehrer and Moyers get paid only in quaaludes.
Yet, she recieves no public funding.
I hope thats sarcasm and not more progressive wealth redistribution aka theft.
Ohh Couric is successful, she must be brought down!!!! How dare she make more than a taxpayer funded non profit!!!!
It's just a misappropriation of national resources. An inequity easily readjusted by targeted taxes. Popularity is one thing, Worth is quite another.
The Worth of American poor children suffering without healthcare is a billion times more valuable than Curic's Popularity or contribution.
I know its difficult for a Social Darwinist to understand, but start by putting yourself in a poor child’s shoes.
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NPR receives a relatively small portion of its budget from government funding. When it does, it's in the form of competitive grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a federal fund. In total government funding comes to less than 20%. I'm sure CBS and/or its parent company Westinghouse receive a fair amount of government dollars as well.
http://www.npr.org/about/privatesupport.html
I gave your remark a 'thumbs up' but I hope you're aware that the nutters here (even though they know what you're saying is true) still need to play the 'game'.
IMO, your time would be better spent ignoring their 'fool'ishness and saving keystrokes.
Or his son's lack of shoes due to the exploding deficit.
And is that more or less than Couric gets in taxpayer paid public funding for her salary?
On a side note I would be interested to see if Price Waterhous and/or CBS got public funding, you have any data on this? I'm not saying your wrong, just that I have never seen this claim before, and would be interested as to your source for this assertion.
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I'm still torqued that NPR was forced to do away with “We Do the Work”. A series on people that work various jobs and about various labor skills. It was incredibly interesting. Unfortunately corporate pressure successfully suppressed the series because they said it was “Pro Union and thus socialist propaganda”.
Honestly, I don’t know why Americans lay down and take this oppression against their Constitutional right to Free Speech. Well you can say that the general “for profit” media didn’t bother to speak up either. Gee, I wonder what their lack of incentive was?
And I refuse to give them money cause they are such corporate whores…
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Obviously it does not follow that NPR deserves so much more.
(NPR's correct role is that of C-SPAN, broadcasting government processes, not lefty playpen stuff.)
If Couric's company believes she worth it so be it. I don't particularly have any issues with big personalities receiving big salaries.
However if the broadcast companies are having financial troubles and they do not adjust these sorts of salaries to bring them in line with their weakening budgets, then they have no right to whine about the expense of business.