On 16th April of this year, I drew attention on this website to Media people’s hypocrisy over taxes, charitable giving and details of personal income. The Securities and Exchange Commission in the USA had proposed that companies should be made to spread the net a little wider when publicizing the incomes of their top earners. At present only the earnings of the top four officers in a company have to be made public and this usually includes the CEO and CFO.
The intention of this requirement is to enable shareholders to know what they are paying to their most highly rewarded employees. The in-word for this concept is “transparency” and it is a word we should all get used to, just as we have been forced to digest “inclusiveness”, “diversity” and several other words that have been hijacked to put certain concepts beyond question as “good things”. As it happens, I like the concept of transparency, though I suspect that many who want transparency of business people’s incomes are only interested in stirring up class envy. Media people are particularly good at stirring up class envy and hatred of capitalism and we all now know that “Big Oil” ‘Big Farma” are evil forces along with “windfall “profits.
Curiously though, ‘Big Hollywood” or “Big CNN” are not dirty words and if a film or TV series makes unexpectedly big profits, we do not hear much about “windfalls”. Rather we are all invited to join in the celebrations as though we too have benefited. Michael Moore did rather well financially with his unpatriotic (some might say traitorous) propaganda film about 9/11 but I don’t recall any media outcry for special taxation. Indeed we were told by the Media that the film’s box office success was evidence of its greatness.
Well, surprise, surprise, the Media Class did not like the SEC’s proposal that there should be greater transparency about top incomes since it transpired that people like network TV anchor Katie Couric would be caught in the net. The clause containing the proposal that companies should disclose pay of as many as three “non-executive” employees became known as the “Katie Couric clause”. Media people are awfully coy about their personal finances except when publicizing a remuneration package to reinforce public awe about their talents. In this instance, the Media Class set about getting the SEC proposal withdrawn.
It does not surprise Radical and Right that it is likely that the SEC is about to withdraw the proposal. We say that the Media Class is the most powerful class in Western societies and can intimidate politicians into implementing the Media’s agenda. The chairman of the SEC, Christopher Cox is a Republican, but he knows from personal experience that to draw the ire of the Media Class is to risk career destruction. He now says that he is less concerned about pay for actors and athletes than executives because the pay of entertainers is subject to market forces. His committee members seem to be similarly persuaded and will probably vote on Wednesday to scrap the offending clause. Miss Couric, a self- righteous Leftist, can breathe easily that her earnings, reputed to be in the many, many millions per year, will not become “transparently” public.
Media people love publicity and few seem able to live without it, but they like it on their own terms. As they now constitute the ruling class, they are increasingly able to dictate both the terms and the law.