The cable industry gets a lot of doom and gloom coverage, but one thing's still looking up... CEO salaries.

In a list of top cable and media CEOs, total compensation for 2014 averaged out at nearly $40 million. Yes, that sounds like a lot of money, but there are a couple of outliers throwing that average off. Take out the top two earners -- Discovery Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: DISCA, DISCB, DISCK) CEO David Zaslav and Liberty Global Inc. (Nasdaq: LBTY) CEO Michael Fries -- and the average drops down to a much more reasonable number just shy of $30 million. (See Cable Execs Are Minting Money.)

How do we know? Light Reading waded through SEC filings to find out whose salaries in the cable and media industries were obscenely over the top last year, and whose were only mildly eyebrow-raising. We learned all about which CEOs are incented to "drive immediate shareholder alignment," and then we rubbed the sleep from our eyes and compiled a few simple charts to rank executive earnings from top to bottom.

A few highlights:

For all of the details on cable executive pay, read our Prime Reading special: Cable Execs Are Minting Money.

Also, find out who are the highest paid service provider executives in our earlier Prime Reading: Because They're Worth It?

— Mari Silbey, Senior Editor, Cable/Video, Light Reading