Posts tagged “NPR”

Factoid: Katie Couric’s Salary vs. NPR’s Budget

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.Michael Massing
Columbia Journalism Review

Via BoingBoing

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Yet another AIG junket planned for next week?

Write Congress!

and/or

Call Congress!

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said on Hardball today that the AIG executives evidently have another junket planned for next week. I’m not sure if the bad publicity will scare off these robber barons, but I’m not going to wait around to find out. Take a moment and write your congressional representatives and tell them to pull the plug on this outrageous spending or on the AIG bailout all together!

This time, I don’t think I’m going to offer up my letter right out of the gates. But if you are so inclined, I’d love to see what you end up saying about this. Please post your letters in the comments section so we can all bask in the glory of populist outrage!

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AIG Junket?!? As soon as I am done with my piece of cake, I’m coming for your fucking heads!

Aside from McCain’s new $300 billion bailout plan for homeowners, the AIG Junket was the big news of tonight’s debate for me. I missed this story earlier in the day. However, Jim Zarroli over at NPR seems to think it isn’t a big deal:

Obama talked about AIG executives on a junket which was apparently true, but they were from the clean side of the company, the insurance side, not financial products division. That’s an important distinction.Jim Zarroli
NPR

So, Jim would have you believe that the $85 billion bailout of AIG is going to be given only to the “clean side” of the company. Those dirty bastards over in financial services won’t get to see a dime of it? Uh, how about this, Jimbo: Bullshit! That isn’t how it works and you know it. If we had not bailed out the “bad” side, the “good” side would not have had the $443,344 to spend on the junket in the first place.

This is, pure and simple, you and I paying for $3 per minute (!) massages for the assholes that didn’t have the courage to stop their co-workers from running the nation’s largest insurer into the ground.

Not nearly good enough, Congress. Not nearly good enough, AIG. I want my money back!

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