Top BBC male hosts take pay cut after gender pay-gap blowback​

Six of the BBC’s top-paid male hosts agreed to take pay cuts after recent revelations of pay disparity between men and women at the publicly-funded U.K. media outlet.

The pay reductions come after the Jan. 8 resignation of Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor, who’d found out her male colleagues were being paid far more than her. The company's pay scale had drawn international attention last summer when the government forced the global media powerhouse to publicly disclose the salaries of those making over £150,000 ($212,800).

The top male earner was making £2.2 million ($3.1 million) between 2016 and 2017 while the top female earner was making a fifth of that, around £450,000 ($638,640).

The BBC announced the salaries of Jeremy Vine, Huw Edwards, Nicky Campbell, John Humphrys, Jon Sopel, and Nick Robinson would all be reduced.

"I think it needs to be sorted out and I support my female colleagues who have rightly said they should be paid the same when they're doing the same job," Vine, the highest earner of the group said, according to the BBC, one of the world's most trusted media sources.

"It's just a no-brainer, so it wasn't a problem for me to accept one [a pay cut]," Vine added.

The BBC bizarrely changed its story multiple times over the course of Friday, the Telegraph reported. The story was brought up in the company’s 9 a.m. editorial meeting, according to BuzzFeed News, and then reporters had to call the BBC’s press office to get the facts straight.

No corrections were issued to the piece as of 10 a.m.

The BBC said in a statement Friday it was “very grateful to Huw Edwards, Nicky Campbell, John Humphrys, Jon Sopel, Nick Robinson, and Jeremy Vine — most being household names in the U.K. — who have agreed that their pay will now be reduced.”

"The final details of some of these changes are still being discussed, and there are further conversations that the BBC will have with others in due course,” the statement added.

Cover: Jeremy Vine on the "Lorraine" TV show, London, September 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)