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All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover the Treasury Department's plan to impose a salary cap on financial sector executives who receive funds from the next tranche of the TARP bailout. CBS used business correspondent Anthony Mason in New York. Both NBC and ABC treated it as a political story, filed by their White House correspondents. The cap of $500,000 a year is not retroactive, ABC's Jake Tapper pointed out, so the bosses at AIG and Bank of America and Citigroup do not have to take a pay cut yet. Even in the future, NBC's Chuck Todd was puzzled: "What is unclear is the penalties for not complying."
CBS' Anthony Mason did give us an idea of the size of the hit that the execs can expect: Ken Lewis, boss of Bank of America, made $5.7m in salary and bonuses in 2007 plus $14.7m in stock options and other income; John Stumpf, Wells Fargo's chief, took home $11.4m. Such lavish executive pay is not unusual, Mason generalized, citing Forbes magazine's statistics: in 1980, the average corporate boss made 40 times the pay of the average worker; by 2007, that ratio was grown to 433:1.
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