A FACTOR IN THE FAILURE OF NETWORK NEWS

Here is an interesting factoid from a recent Michael Massing Columbia Journalism Review blog that suggests that the cult of personality may have a hand in the failure of mainstream TV news:

“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.”

It also reveals a sad truth about the mainstream media today: most of the money spent reporting the news isn’t spent on journalists and reporting. It’s spent on celebrity news readers.

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