REMEMBER when people used to blame the parents? Or “society”? These days it’s the media what’s to blame. Celebs in rehab? Media poured the stuff down their throats and stuffed the rest up their noses. War in Iraq a horrific, ill-conceived quagmire? Media. The same holds true for the outrage expressed by some people for the massive pay checks failing chief executives have been awarding themselves in recent years.

Just ask Angelo Mozilo, the Countrywide chief executive who raked in $120m (€78m) in compensation while pushing his company off a cliff. Mozilo, along with other business stars including the former Citigroup chief Charles Prince and former Merrill Lynch boss Stanley O’Neal, is now the target of an investigation into outsized executive compensation led by Henry Waxman, a Californian Democrat.

Last week Muckraked, an investigative reporting blog, published a summary of Waxman’s findings so far. In an e-mail to an executive compensation consultant working on his behalf, Mozilo wrote: “Boards have been placed under enormous pressure by the left-wing antibusiness press and the envious leaders of unions and other so-called ‘CEO Comp Watchers’ and therefore Boards are being forced to protect themselves.”

Countrywide was among the biggest players in the subprime mortgage market. The e-mail was written in October 2006, when Countrywide was pushing mortgages on people who could not afford them, but well before the cracks started to appear in the company or its products. At the time a compensation consultant hired by Countrywide had recommended scaling back Mozilo’s pay, but his recommendations had been rejected in favour of those from a rival, who wanted to give Mozilo “maximum opportunity”.

Nobody - perhaps not even the commie media - would have cared if Mozilo had been doing a good job. But the fact is he wasn’t. And nor were the equally richly rewarded bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup.

As Waxman points out, Mozilo, O’Neal and Prince had pay packages collectively worth $460m from January 2002 to December 2006 as their companies’ stock rose.

Waxman added: “Any alignment between the compensation of the CEOs and their shareholders’ interests appears to break down in 2007, however. Despite steep declines in the performance and stock price of the three companies resulting from the mortgage crisis . . . Mr Mozilo received over $120m in compensation and sales of Countrywide stock; Mr O’Neal was allowed to leave Merrill Lynch with a $161m retirement package; and Mr Prince was awarded a $10m bonus, $28m in unvested stock and options, and $1.5m in annual perquisites upon his departure.”

All when their companies “lost more than $20 billion in the last two quarters of 2007 . . . as a result of investments in subprime and other risky mortgages”.

Nice work if you can get it.

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