It's taking every bit of self-restraint I have not to title this post "Nikki Finke Says Dick Parsons Has An Unusually Large Package." (That would be too easy. And it's New York--aim for the class envy.) Finke, on a recent Entertainment Weekly column about celebrity greed, writes:

Hypocrisy, thy name is EW's parent company, Time Warner. Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons gave himself a perk that's a monument to ego: a 5,000-square-foot, 21st-floor, marble-and-rare-wood dream suite (a supposed $25 mil to build out) inside the swankiest and priciest NYC office space, the new Time Warner Center. Parsons and the other heads of the Mammoth Media conglomerates feeding America its infotainment—Disney, Sony, Viacom, General Electric and News Corp.—may gag on celebrity greed, but they never stop indulging their own corporate gluttony...

It's not just the arrogance of rich, old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone claiming he cuts costs at every corner while at the same time lining his own pockets at the expense of investors that's so nauseating. It's also the profligacy of a public company shameless enough to reimburse Les Moonves, who lives in Los Angeles but also has a New York apartment, $105,000 for the period he stayed in New York at his apartment instead of at a hotel, or Tom Freston, who is based in New York but also has a residence in Los Angeles, $43,100 for the time he spent staying at his L.A. home instead of a hotel.

Really Big Packages [LA Weekly]