In 1982, experienced print and TV reporters in top markets earned an average of $ 29,000, while the average media c.e.o., among I I corporations studied, earned $ 923,000. So the average media c.e.o. earned 32 times more than the working stiffs who formed the backbone of his organization.

Last year the top print and TV reporters earned an average of $ 50.000, for a decade-long increase of 72 percent. But the average media c.e.o. earned $ 2,407,000, for a decade-long increase of 161 percent. Thus, while the average media c.e.o. earned 32 times more than an experienced reporter at a major news outlet in 1982, the ratio had widened, ten years later, to 48 to 1.

Recall here that Plato told Aristotle that no member of a community ought to earn more than 5 times the pay of the lowest worker in the community. And reporters, though pitifully paid, are decidedly not the lowest-paid workers in the media community.

But forget Plato. J.P. Morgan, no friend to socialism, thought that c.e.o.s ought to earn no more than 20 times the pay of a worker. More recently, management guru Peter Drucker also weighed in with a c.e.o.-to-average-employee pay ratio of 20 to 1. (There was no income tax to chip away at top pay rates in Morgan's day, but when Drucker offered his ideal ratio, income tax rates were higher than they are today.)

At The Wall Street Journal and Barron's, meanwhile, union officers had the business savvy to put this issue to Dow Jones & Co. shareholders this fall -- via a proposal that urges the company to limit c.e.o. compensation to 20 times the average employee compensation. The current ratio, the union says, is 40 to 1. Company executives cannot tell employees, on the one hand, that they "all contribute to the bottom line," says union president Ronald Chen, while, on the other hand, disproportionately rewarding themselves when the team is successful.

And then there are the Japanese, with c.e.o. pay ratios (measured off the pay of an average worker) of somewhere in the 15-25 to I range, depending on whom you talk to. And the Germans and the French, with pay ratios of around 25-30 to 1. And the British, with a pay ratio of around 30-35 to 1.

In the U.S., the equivalent ratio -- c.e.o. to average worker -- is 157 to 1. (Note here again that these statistics are based on the pay of average-paid workers, not on the pay of big league reporters.)

Of course, in America top performers are supposed to get big money, right? But are these media c.e.o.s top performers? I measured the compounded total annual return to shareholders (counting both stock price appreciation and reinvested dividends) during the period commencing December 31, 1982, and ending December 31, 1992, and found that the average media company, among the 11 studied, generated a compounded total annual return of 12.7 percent. That level ranked the average media company in the bottom quarter as measured against the total return performance during the same period of the 200 largest companies (largest in terms of the Value of their outstanding shares during 1992; the group includes most of these II media companies.)

If a pay-for-performance justification won't wash, how about good old supply and demand as a rationale'? Reporters are a dime a dozen, so this argument would start, but not good c.e.o.s; thus the reason for the surge in c.e.o. pay in media companies lies purely and simply in the fact that there just aren't that many qualified candidates for these highly demanding jobs.

Here's a flaw in that one: in looking over the list of current media c.e.o.s, I couldn't find a single woman. (In fairness, there used to be one woman heading a major media company -- the one located in our nation's capital -- but she turned the business over to her son.)

Now if there ever was an industry in which there are plenty of qualified, brainy women, it has to be the media industry. Any one of those women would doubtless waive all her rights under the Equal Pay Act and gladly take the top job for a scant $ 1 million per year. So forget supply and demand, too.

Cast your eyes on the table accompanying this article and you'll see the 11 media companies I studied. You'll also see their total compensation to c.e.o.s in 1982 and 1992 and their company's total return performance during that decade. (Total compensation adds together the c.e.o.'s base salary, his bonus for annual performance, the estimated present value at grant of stock options granted during the year, the value at grant of any shares granted during the year, and the value at payout of long-term performance-awards -- in cash or in shares -- received during the year, as well as miscellaneous compensation; it excludes broad-based fringe benefit programs, such as health insurance and pensions.)

HOW MANY REPORTERS ADD UP TO ONE MEDIA COMPANY CEO?

COMPANY 1982: TOTAL 1992: TOTAL

COMPENSATION OF COMPENSATION OF

CURRENT CEO, WITH THEN-CEO WITH RATIO CURRENT CEO WITH

TO AVERAGE TOP RATIO TO AVERAGE

REPORTER'S PAY ** TOP REPORTER'S

10-YEAR STOCK GROWTH * PAY **

CAPITAL CITIES/ABC, INC. $ 1,409,000 $ 5,642,000

DANIEL B. BURKE *** 15.6% 49:1 113:1

GANNETT CO., INC. $ 926,000 $ 4,731,000

JOHN J. CURLEY 12.2% 32:1 95:1

Columbia Journalism Review, November, 1993

TIME WARNER INC. $ 918,000 $ 3,780,000

GERALD M. LEVIN *** 12.5% 32:1 76:1

CBS INC. $ 816,000 $ 2,285,000

LAURENCE A. TISCH 14.7% 28:1 46:1

DOW JONES & CO., INC. $ 875,000 $ 2,185,000

PETER R. KANN *** 4.3% 30:1 44:1

MCGRAW-HILL, INC. $ 692,000 $ 1,691,000

JOSEPH L. DIONNE 8.4% 24:1 34:1

NEW YORK TIMES CO. $ 831,000 $ 1,593,000

ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER 12.6% 29:1 32:1

TIMES MIRROR CO. $ 707,000 $ 1,548,000

ROBERT F. ERBURU 10.3% 24:1 31:1

KNIGHT-RIDDER, INC. $ 930,000 $ 1,328,000

JAMES K. BATTEN 11.5% 32:1 27:1

TURNER BROADCASTING $ 1,456,000 $ 1,121,000

R. E. TURNER 21.1% 50:1 22:1

WASHINGTON POST CO. $ 597,000 $ 579,000

DONALD E. GRAHAM *** 16.7% 21:1 12:1

* THE COMPOUNDED ANNUAL TOTAL RETURN ON STOCK: 1982-1992. (THE AVERAGE FOR

THE 200 LARGEST U.S. CORPORATIONS, A GROUP THAT INCLUDES MOST OF THESE MEDIA

COMPANIES, WAS 18.3%; THE AVERAGE TOTAL COMPENSATION FOR CEO'S IN THAT GROUP WAS

$ 3,200,000, COMPARED TO $ 2,407,000 FOR THE MEDIA GROUP.)

** THE AVERAGE PAY FOR A TOP PRINT/TV REPORTER WAS $ 29,000 IN 1982, AND $

50,000 IN 1992.

*** THESE CEO'S HAVE SERVED LESS THAN THREE YEARS.

PETER BRADFORD

As for the working folks -- the print and TV reporters -- I looked at Newspaper Guild top minimum salaries for print reporters at 12 major daily, and geographically diversified, newspapers (The New York Times, the Chicago SunTimes, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Rocky Mountain News, The Honolulu Advertiser, The Philadelphia Inquirer the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Pittsburqh Post-Gazette). These top minimum salaries apply to a reporter who typically has five years of experience. The median annual reporter pay among the 12 newspapers was $ 28,800 in 1982 and $ 44,500 in 1992.

As for TV reporters, I relied on data compiled by Vernon Stone, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri. According to his information, the median TV reporter in the 25 largest markets was paid $ 30,800 in 1983. To get a 1982 figure, I discounted this figure by 5 percent, and came up with $ 29,300. For the same markets in 1992, Stone estimated that the annual salary was $ 55,000. To obtain the figures used at the beginning of this article, I simply averaged the pay for print and TV reporters in both 1982 and 1992.

One sideline finding here is that, while in 1982 print and TV reporters were earning virtually the same level of compensation, during the ensuing decade the pay of TV reporters out-paced the pay of print reporters, to the point where by 1992 the typical TV reporter was earning 25 percent more than his print counterpart.

Two other findings are worth pointing up. First, I looked at the pay levels of the II media c.e.o.s in 1992 and asked myself the following question: Given that there is a huge difference between the lowest-paid c.e.o. (Donald E. Graham of the The Washington Post, who earned $ 579,000) and the highestpaid c.e.o. (Daniel B. Burke of Capital Cities/ABC, who earned $ 5.6 million), what factors might explain the difference? Well, I found that fully 61 percent of the differences in pay could be explained on the basis of differences in company size. But none of the remaining 39 percent of the remaining pay variations could be explained on the basis of differences in company performance. (Actually, my correlation studies showed there to be a negative relationship between pay and performance, but the relationship was not deemed to be statistically significant.)

I went on to ask myself a second question: Given that there is a huge difference between the company that gave its c.e.o. the smallest raise between 1982 and 1992 (Turner Broadcasting, which actually cut the pay of its c.e.o., Ted Turner, by 23 percent) and the company that gave its c.e.o. the largest raise during the same period (Gannett, which raised the pay of its c.e.o., John J. Curley, by 411 percent, compared to the pay earned in 1982 by Curley's predecessor, Allen H. Neuharth), can these differences be explained by differences in company performance during the tenyear period? The answer is no.

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