Murdoch takes £1m pay rise - despite a £4bn loss

The media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has awarded himself a £1m pay rise, bringing his total income to £5.9m for the past year, despite his company posting a £4bn loss.

Mr Murdoch's earnings for the 2001-02 financial year were up from £4.9m for the previous 12 months. The pay deal included a bonus of £2m.

His News Corporation empire, which owns The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World, also employs two of Mr Murdoch's sons, who are executive board directors. Lachlan took home £1.1m, while his younger brother, James, who runs the company's Star TV subsidiary in Asia, got £1.8m. While Lachlan is the heir-apparent, for the moment his father's deputy is Peter Chernin, who enjoyed the biggest payday of them all. His total remuneration was £11.5m.

With much of the rest of the media industry, News Corp fell deeply into the red because of a severe downturn in advertising. It was forced to write down the value of businesses that were bought at the height of the dot.com boom. However, even that colossal deficit is far less than the losses seen at News Corp's biggest global rivals, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal. Both those companies replaced their chief executives this year.

In November, Mr Murdoch became a father for the fifth time, at the age of 70, when his young wife, Wendi Deng, gave birth to a daughter, Grace, but he shows no signs of slowing down.

He has suggested he will continue to run his empire until he is 100. By then, Grace may also feel she has a claim in the battle to succeed him.