What happens when exec pay consultants get hired

You wind up with this month's 57-page proxy report to stockholders, one that reads more like Corporate's version of pork barrel politics. There's something there for everyone -- especially, it seems, the two rival teams of executive pay consultants hired by management and the board of directors.

Also like any pork-driven spending bill, the proxy itself keeps ballooning. Google Documents estimates the word count for the executive bonus sections alone in Gannett proxy reports as follows:

• Last year: 630 words
  
• This year: 1,631 words

To set 2008 pay, the board's executive compensation committee retained its own consultants: Pearl Meyer & Partners, after conceding control of Hewitt Associates to the Gannett Management Committee.

The end result: A nakedly political document, where the compensation committee appears to have tried appeasing all sides: every consultant, director, and top Gannett executive got a sentence or phrase they can point to -- while thumping their chest in the locker room.

I challenge any shareholder to follow the tortured argument in favor of the 2008 bonuses; it runs across pages 22-25. Take the hair-raising journey of peaks, valleys, switchbacks -- and a major hairpin turn, to arrive at the $2 million, all-cash destination.

(Indeed, having shoehorned every cockamamie argument into those 1,631 words, I wonder if the committee even understood its own findings. I can imagine the four of them on another long, frustrating conference call. "Screw it,'' one director says, finally. "Split the difference. Give Dubow half what he got last year. Let's go, already. I don't want to miss another Desperate Housewives.")

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