this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
708 points (96.7% liked)

Microblog Memes

5801 readers
2464 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (7 children)

I don’t get the headline.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer 33 points 7 months ago

Stretching here, maybe trying to imply the raise comes due to cutting jobs or raises of lower level employees.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

He can give himself a 25% raise worth several tens of millions of dollars which he made thanks to the hard work of the employees at WB, but these employees get next to nothing during a time where every basic needs like food and shelter are increasingly expensive.

A big part of that money should go to the employees.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I understood it to be mocking the headline's passive tone. The CEO is the one with much of the power to increase their own pay in a company, but the article is talking about it like some unknown magical entity just gifted this guy with $50 million.

And I think it's also combined with the general sentiment that anyone making that much is stealing from workers.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The only issue with that is there is a corporate board and shareholders (only non-binding votes to show approval or displeasure i read in the nyt piece), but cant say you're not wrong either in terms of the board. And maybe something to do with this:

Pay packages like these — when entertainment companies have been walloped by the shift to streaming from traditional television — played a major role in the union strikes. “They plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s,” Fran Drescher, the president of the actors’ union, said at July rally. “It is disgusting.”

Most of the big media companies slashed costs in 2023, laying off thousands of people and announcing plans to make fewer movies and television shows. But Mr. Zaslav and his lieutenants have been particularly aggressive, even shelving nearly finished content like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/business/media/david-zaslav-pay-package.html

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

From a communist lens, the money to give the CEO a raise is the value of labor that workers provided, taken by the CEO instead of shared among the workers who provided it.

So (from that lens) the money going to the CEO is being stolen from the workers, the money is the car in the analogy. But the headline is framing the situation as "X got this thing worth a lot" without considering where the value came from.

Workers whose labor value have been stolen are like a person whose car was stolen, waking up to a positively-framed article about someone else receiving the stolen goods.

[–] Anticorp 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I think someone misinterpreted the Discovery network name, thinking it meant he found it. That was my initial impression.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

No, it's most likely about the layoffs and pay cuts the companies do to their employees to give themselves a raise.

[–] hangonasecond 2 points 7 months ago

No, he is the CEO of the company "Warner Bros. Discovery" from a quick google. I think it's just unfamiliar to see someone's pay increase retroactively, since it literally doesn't happen for normal people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I could def be wrong, but it might have to do with Zaslav's 'vision' to move focus towards 'unscripted programming', as in reality tv, true crime and live sports, less on scripted programming. My guess* is the car that's laying about is reality tv and regular people. He's not really helping create new shows, great storytelling, rather just using regular people to draw in viewers and rake in profits. I imagine the cost of unscripted programming is much less than truly scripted programming.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Yeah, that got me too