The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an excellent investigation into board pay at public companies in Wisconsin.
While compensation for chief executive officers has long been a focus of shareholders and the media, pay for board members has largely escaped scrutiny - even though it has soared in recent years and responsibilities have increased after several corporate scandals.
Lots of bucks for a few hours here and there:
More than 50 board members made $200,000 or more by advising one or more Wisconsin public companies last year. Eight board members were paid more than $400,000 last year.
Nice work if you can get it.
— I pretty much always enjoy it when Steven Pearlstein gets in a dudgeon.
Here he is on Ivan Seidenberg, longtime Verizon CEO and head of the Business Roundtable:
Rather, he revealed himself to be nothing more than a corporate hack peddling the much-discredited country-club nonsense that what’s good for corporate cash flow is good for America. His presentation was so riddled with hyperbole, junk economics and logical inconsistencies that it will be a long while before anyone in Washington takes him, or the Business Roundtable, seriously again.
Even better, Pearlstein uses Seidenberg’s hubris to go off on Big Business in general. For example:
They demand that the government scrap programs designed to prevent foreclosures on homes but want new tax breaks for commercial real estate developers to prevent foreclosures on office building and shopping centers.
They demand a green light for new free-trade treaties but offer no help for workers whose jobs will be lost because of them.
Big Business is unused to having anyone in power push back against them, however mildly Obama has done so. But with hubris comes the inevitable reckoning—and the last couple of years have not been it.
— Matt Taibbi, in his takedown of the jaw-droppingly clueless Lara Logan—who criticized Taibbi’s Rolling Stone colleague Michael Hastings for, you know, reporting what powerful people said—has some sage advice for all journalists:
As to this whole “unspoken agreement” business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies.
Oh yeah, the money quote:
Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering!
So true, and so misunderstood by so many journalists.
And you gotta love Vanity Fair's Hasting back story here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/why-the-hacks-hate-michael-hastings.html
"Hastings was for a time Newsweek’s Baghdad correspondent. In 2008, that mediocre publication assigned him to cover our republic’s most recent and ridiculous electoral contest, and as a consequence the fellow got an insider’s view of how terribly destructive is the manner in which this country covers its most important decisions. This sentiment is widespread among the more observant media professionals, who generally do not act on it out of concern for their own careers. In contrast, Hastings quit Newsweek and wrote a damning exposé about what he had seen and experienced during his stint. During a time in which many journalists thought of little more than how they would attain security for themselves, Hastings ensured that he would never be trusted by the establishment media ever again...
Here, finally, Lowry has hit upon a valid point. McChrystal and Co. would have exhibited far better judgment had they looked into Hastings’s career and writings and come to the obvious conclusion that this sort of journalist has nothing to lose in reporting a series of demonstrable facts. Unlike many of this country’s most respected commentators, Hastings did not spend the better part of a decade repeating conventional wisdom about our allegedly unprecedented success in two wars that have already proven to be abject failures, and thus he has no reason to simply take the word of some or another confused presidential administration that everything is under control, or will be after some additional expenditure of blood and treasure. McChrystal would have been better off talking to Thomas Friedman, who is so amusingly naïve that in 2001 he declared Vladimir Putin to be a force for good for whom Americans all ought to be “rootin’,” a term he chose because it rhymes with Putin. McChrystal would have been somewhat less better-off talking to Charles Krauthammer, who has long been the most respected of conservative commentators despite the fact that he has been demonstrably wrong about every U.S. military action of the last 12 years and plenty else besides; the Washington Post columnist would have presumably returned with another round of good news and thereby jinxed the entire operation. Neither of these men are defeatists; both declared victory in Afghanistan long ago. Both have won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Friedman himself now sits on the Pulitzer committee. And thus it is that Hastings and others like him will never win any Pulitzer Prizes for journalism or commentary no matter how much their work changes the course of history, which is just as well, as they seem to be made from lead and recipients seem unable to refrain from licking them."
Linked to by glenzilla here:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/28/journalism/index.html
The Establishment Press? As the great Bruce Campbell would say, "Bunch of bitchy little girls."
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 30 Jun 2010 at 12:00 AM
Friedman and Krauthammer are columnists, not reporters, so the comparison of Hastings with these two hacks is not really apt. Friedman and Krauthammer do opinion -- and badly, I agree -- but it really isn't that helpful to bring them in to a debate about reporters and how they do their jobs. If we want to have a conversation about journalism and how reporters do or don't do their jobs, it's important to leave the opinion columnists out of it. Conflating the two functional categories is just a distraction from the legitimate issues.
It's a lot more relevant, though still somewhat off, to compare the shocking statements by Lara Logan, a CBS television reporter who was embedded (literally!) with the military, to the work of Hastings, a freelance print reporter whose "beat" is the war in Afghanistan.
Logan's shocking statements made clear that she has given up her role as a reporter whose beat is the military and has become a military spox embedded with CBS. There is no question here that her loyalties are with the people she's covering, as Taibbi pointed out. We see this transfer of loyalties mainly among television journalists, whose management structure is from the entertainment end of the industry rather than editorial, but we also have seen the same thing with Walter Pincus and his natsec beat, with the McCainiacs like Ed Chen, Dana Milbank, and Holly Bailey on the donuts-with-sprinkles bus during the campaign, the fawning Bush-Cheney lovers like VandeHei and Mike Allen, and so on.
But I think that transfer of loyalty from reporting to protecting is much less evident in print reporting than in television. Obviously *some* reporters, newspaper, magazine, broadcast, whatever, forget "who they are working for" but it's unfair and unhelpful to over-generalize and cast them all with the same broad brush.
@Ryan, you've been a "beat" reporter for WSJ. How common would you say it is for a "beat" reporter to become embedded with his subjects? Do you agree with Taibbi's take, or do you have some caveats and reservations about his latest rant?
#2 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 30 Jun 2010 at 03:37 AM