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- Dateline MEDIA 08.08.12
You’re Worth How Much? TV Anchors, by the Numbers
Cooper. Sawyer. Blitzer. They have multimillion-dollar contracts and perfect hair. But which newsmakers deliver the most bang for their boss’s bucks? We do the math.
For all the buzz about how much television news anchors earn these days—Matt Lauer recently made waves after reportedly signing a $25 million–a–year contract with NBC—a more important question often remains unanswered: are any of these enormous paychecks, in fact, worth it?
To try to answer the question, The Daily Beast divided the individual salaries of some of the top talking heads by the number of viewers their shows bring in. By looking at how much these guys earn per viewer, we hoped to get a sense of who’s delivering to their network bosses the most bang for the buck.
Of course, TV news stars don’t make it a habit of publicly disclosing their salaries. So we first looked for media reports about what each makes, and then ran those numbers by industry sources. Audience figures are based on Nielsen ratings for the week of July 16 for network shows, and July 16 itself for cable.
The results were surprising. For example, while the overall numbers might indicate that networks pay more than cable, on a per-viewer basis, that’s not always true. ABC’s World News anchor Diane Sawyer makes $12 million to Anderson Cooper’s $11 million. But with roughly 608,000 people tuning into CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the anchor is one of the highest paid on TV, pulling in more than $18 per viewer. Considering Sawyer has an audience of 7.32 million, she seems like a relative steal for ABC, at $1.63 per viewer.
By some measures, MSNBC appears to be more generous with its staff than network sister NBC—especially if you’re a man. Joe Scarborough, of Morning Joe, earns $4 million and has an audience of 367,000, which comes to $10.89 per viewer. In contrast, even at $25 million, Matt Lauer is only costing NBC $5.88 per viewer, considering the Today show’s audience of 4.2 million.
In general, on both network and cable, women are still paid less than men; if you’re in doubt, check out Today cohost Savannah Guthrie’s reported salary—at less than 50 cents per viewer, she’s a relative bargain for NBC. Among the networks, generally considered more august than their rabble-rousing cable cousins, the exception is ABC, which pays its women more than the men. CBS is a close, penny-pinching second, and CNBC wins the thrifty award for cable.
Dan Gross and Paula Froelich dissect anchors’ salaries.
ABC and CNBC didn’t return calls seeking comment. Fox, NBC, CNN, and CBS declined to comment, as did MSNBC, though a spokeswoman for that network said our salary estimates were “wildly inaccurate.”
Industry experts say viewers—or potential viewers—are just part of the calculation that goes into salaries. The value of an anchor also depends on how much advertising can be sold against his or her show, for example. While the size of the audience plays into that, so do the demographics. A show might only attract a few hundred thousand viewers, but if those viewers are relatively well off, the show can command a premium for coveted ad spots. Advertisers also pay a big premium for younger audiences. Anchors who deliver the 18-to-35 or 25-to-54 age range are compensated accordingly, especially since the news audience tends to skew older. Networks, more so than cable, also compensate their anchors in part for being available to fly around the world when a big story breaks or a disaster takes place.
Television’s anchor salaries aren’t “much different from the movie business,” says Derek Baine, a senior analyst at SNL Kagan, a media-consulting firm. “It’s supply and demand—their agents check the market and try to drum up competition to make it seem as if that person has other options to go elsewhere.”
Indeed, anchors are increasingly one-person brands, and the bigger that brand’s star power, the more likely they are to land big interviews and specials, which can be syndicated and rake in huge profits above and beyond their regular programs.
“Look at Matt Lauer—is he worth it?” says Stephen Battaglio, the TV Guide business editor who edits the annual salary issue for the magazine. “Matt is central to [Today]—if he left, ratings would plummet and NBC would lose at least $100-125 million in ad revenue. His salary generates the ratings and audience that will keep advertisers paying what they do.”
Same with a guy like Brian Williams, who “brings stature, and physically represents NBC,” says Battaglio. “There are some intangibles there as well. People who deliver the news for you, the personalities you’ve developed over the years, they become your brand and there is a value that can’t always be quantified …This is built up over time—stature, connection, relationship with the audience. It’s an investment.”
3 comments
This article doesn’t actually refute anything stated by the mainstream media about Syria. I was hoping to find one great article to read to my mom…
THIS SITE IS FULL OF ARTICLES DIRECTLY RELATED TO SYRIA. Just look around. Also, we doubt you’ll see on any mainstream media this kind of analysis. If you do, or have, point it to us.
Have you ever heard a mainstream media figure say something like this:
“The American network CBS (Calumny Broadcasting System) is at it all the time, planting lies in the minds of a largely clueless public, and so are its sisters at home and abroad, including NBC, ABC, BBC, FOX News, and even the supposedly more ideologically neutral PBS (which has been rightfully nicknamed, the “Petroleum Broadcasting System”. Guess why.) PBS’ famed and wrongly admired news show, The Newshour, is an excellent example of liberaloid disinformation at its sanctimonious best. (See The Political Function of PBS, by Alex Cockburn). Note that these propaganda memes against opponents of the empire go on for years, even decades, until the goal is accomplished: the total demonization of a nation and its leaders, with the tacit implication that righteous America has the moral right to intervene by any means necessary to re-establish “freedom and democracy…”
I doubt it.
Maybe you are confusing this post’s intent altogether. This is not a post meant to tell all the complex truths about Syria. W have done that in dozens of otehr articles. This is a post meant to show the frequent attempts of the capitalist mainstream media to defame and demonize a government so that it can be more easily overtthrown with ample support from the American public. Thus, the videos here ARE from teh mainstream media, but look at our commentary which says very clearly they are imperialist propaganda, therefore should be seen as the precise opposite of the truth.