Joe Battenfeld at the Boston Herald reported on Friday that PBS superstation WGBH is acting like it's very high on the hog, paying lavish salaries and bonuses to executives (at least for taxpayer-subsidized TV) even as the Trump administration has proposed zeroing out federal funding.
The station's CEO Jonathan Abbott was given an $85,000 bonus in 2016, bringing his annual compensation package up to $624,930.
Jim Braude, a fairly new on-air host hired to replace Emily Rooney (daughter of the late Andy Rooney), earned $364,000 in 2016. He anchors a half-hour news program called Greater Boston each weekday on WGBH.
Braude's a left-wing activist who founded a union called the National Organization of Legal Services Workers, which helped save the leftist Legal Services Corporation from Reagan-era defunding. He also served on the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Battenfeld said the last reports showed Rooney earned only $230,000 a year. The station claimed Braude's three-hour-a-day radio gig explains the difference in pay.
Other WGBH executives with the lavish pay included:
• Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Benjamin Godley, who was the second-highest paid executive and topped out at $471,970 in total compensation. Godley’s total includes $50,000 in bonus and incentive pay.
• Vice President of National Programming John Bredar, who earned $385,383 in salary and benefits, including a $45,000 bonus.
• Executive producer David Fanning, who made $359,676 in fiscal 2016.
• Executive producer Raney Aronson, whose annual take was $359,044.
Overall salary expenses at the station have gone up, even as revenues have gone down. Liberals usually mock that statistic when it's a large private corporation.
Here's a recent tweet from Braude that sounds exactly like the rest of Brian Stelter's anti-Trump gang:
