NPR Host Paid Nearly $500K;
President Got $624K
The corporate media pays its executives and star reporters and anchors good money for their services, but the top salaries on the corporate and reporting sides at the nonprofit National Public Radio news operation, don't approach the millions of dollars paid each year to the likes of marquee TV news personalities, but the NPR salaries are still sizable.
I looked at the 2006 and 2007 IRS 990 filings by NPR and found some healthy six-figure compensation packages.
In 2006, Ed Gordon, who had hosted "News & Notes," received compensation totaling $478,456, before he left NPR.
The tax filing for 2007 reveals Kevin Klose, president of NPR, partial take home package was $474,171, and he also received $153,057 from the NPR Foundation, for a total compensation of $624,228.
Next comes the CEO, Kenneth Stern, who got $429,037.
On the news reporting side, the top salary went to Barbara Della Porta Rehm at $383,139. After her came Robert Siegel at $350,288, then Renee Montagne at $332,160, with Steve Inskeep rounding out the list at $331,242.
NPR is to be saluted for posting their IRS 990 forms on their site, and making them easy to find. Media transparency is soo much easier when the outlets provide salary information for anyone to see.
It is commendable that you highlight the, often over-inflated, salaries of executives in the public and non-profit sectors, especially when these executives seem to lead inept organizations to little or no achievement. *cough HRC cough*
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you could articulate for your readers your opinion about appropriate salary levels or point to some other metric that might help folks to consider what fair compensation looks like for these individuals. This post stirred me to ask this question because, frankly, none of these salaries seem grossly inflated to me. What do you think? What is appropriate pay for executives in large organizations? How about in organizations facing budget cutbacks in a rapidly shrinking economy?
Is this important conversation already happening in activist cirlces and I'm just missing it?