DC Trawler

Keith Olbermann: still #1!

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Er… when it comes to being overpaid, that is. The LA Times ran the numbers on TV personalities and their salaries, and here’s what they found:

We gathered data on the salaries of celebrities, based on interviews with talent agency representatives, managers and network officials as well as on published reports.

Next we divided the annual salary by the total viewers drawn by the star’s show. The quotient reveals what each personality makes per viewer, which provides a rough (sometimes very rough) measure of whether that person is overpaid…

Current, Al Gore’s upstart cable channel, paid Keith Olbermann $10 million per year plus an unspecified ownership stake to head up its news division and host a prime-time show (the figure was later confirmed in court documents). That means Current was paying Olbermann more than $56 per viewer — far and away the highest ratio we encountered. That, along with much-publicized behind-the-scenes feuding, might help explain why Gore & Co. ended up this year firing the combative host, who responded with a pending lawsuit.

And if Keith wins his lawsuit, that’ll be $70 million per viewer. Well, not counting the guy in the mirror. Beat that, Chelsea Handler! (That’s what Chelsea Handler said.)