Overseeing News Corp’s phone hacking and bribery scandal pays pretty well it seems. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch will be getting a $12.5M bonus, which with his salary takes him to $33M for the 2011 fiscal year, a 47% raise. Son James would have been getting $17.9M, but for some reason, he turned down his $6M bonus. All the brass is doing pretty well: CFO David DeVoe more than doubled his haul from $7.1M in 2010 to $18.2M. COO Chase Carey took home $30.2M, including a $10M bonus and $15.2M in stock. Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes is getting $15.6M. The numbers came out in an SEC filing. No word as of yet that the 80-year-old mogul wil turn down his bonus.

The Hollywood part of News Corp’s empire would love to see new board nominee Jim Breyer’s digital savvy and relationships deliver the kind of boost Steve Jobs gave Disney when he was on that board. The Accel partner is the new No. 1 on Forbes‘ Midas List and has the tech cred. He bet big on Facebook before it left News Corp’s MySpace in the dust and his company is the social network’s biggest outside investor. He’s on the WalMart and Dell boards and knows showbiz. He’s on the Legenary Pictures board and was a director at Marvel before Disney bought it. But the political and crime thriller that will play out in ”this exciting time in the company’s history” as he called it in a short statement, will be uncharted territory for the 50-year-old Bryer.

 
It might be faint praise, but Thomas Perkins, who stepped down from the News Corp board along with Kenneth Cowley Friday, had been called the “most independent voice among Ruperty Murdoch’s cronies.” He’s been critical of the way the scandal has been handled, but said Friday that wasn’t why he was leaving and that he had told Rupert Murdoch he was leaving earlier this year.  ”I said I don’t think the board should have two 80-year olds unless one of them owns the company,” said Perkins, who turns 80 later this year. He knows his way around a major corporate scandal. He resigned from the board of Hewlett Packard after it was found that company spied on its directors and journalists to find information leaks. Cowley, an Australian exec withNews Corp for decades, has been a director since 1979. Withtwo directors leaving and just one nominated, the board will will shrink to 15 members. Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth was set to become the 17th director and fourth family member seated, but the nomination was dropped in the wake of the hacking scandal. The annual meeting with shareholders will be held on Oct. 21 on the Fox lot in L.A.