Hypocritical Media Czars Earn More than Wall Street Bigs?

It remains true that Wall Street firms pay out a larger percentage of their annual revenue as compensation to employees than any other industry where companies are publicly traded. Yet there is a clear pattern: Absolute levels of Wall Street pay, in relation to some other fields, have been coming down in recent years. There are good reasons for this, of course. Generally, profits have been down, return on equity is down, revenue growth is down, stock prices are down and regulation is up.

Where do they go? There should be a stampede back into professions such as the media industry, where top executives quietly hauled down a fortune in 2011 compensation. Six media executives wound up in the top 15 of the Associated Press’s list of highest-paid executives released last week; not a single banker joined them.