UPDATE “Tribune’s top exec poised to resign,” said the chicagotribune.com headline Wednesday, the day after the column below went to press, proposing a picture that’s hard to imagine. How does one assume a resigning pose? Is the model nude or fully dressed? At any rate, Randy Michaels is obviously gone as CEO of Tribune Company, though some niggling detail has to be dealt with first—probably including a severance package that would set any one of us up for life.
You never know about sources, especially the ones that go unnamed (which, unfortunately, is how mine in this story chose to go). Anonymity also helps account for the sour aftertaste to Carr’s delicious page-one tale. No one at the Tribune I’ve talked to in the past few days says Carr got it wrong. But he didn’t get it exactly right either.
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Even Arthur Brisbane, the Times‘s public editor, has admitted to some ambivalence. Brisbane called his own readers’ attention to the way Carr began his account, with an anecdote about Michaels allegedly offering a waitress $100 to show her breasts. Lechery focuses contempt, so the anecdote efficiently launched Carr’s account of a once-great media conglomerate being run into the ground by boors. But Carr named neither of the sources he claimed for this randy behavior. “I enjoyed David Carr’s immense takeout … as much as the next reader,” Brisbane blogged on October 15, but he wished Carr had found a way in that didn’t invite so many questions.
I should mention that it was Fuller who negotiated the Times Mirror deal in 2000. There are people still at the Tribune who have never forgiven him for the company’s troubles. The larger point is that what went wrong inside the tower began years before the arrival of Zell, Michaels, or the late, unlamented chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams. Michaels and Abrams both came out of radio and knew nothing about newspapers, but that made them a lot like the CEO Fuller had no use for, Dennis FitzSimons, who came up through the ad sales side of Tribune Broadcasting..
It’s the supposedly transformed work culture that most perplexes the Tribune newsroom employees I’ve been in touch with. “I never ever saw that frat house mentality, frat house behavior, that Carr tried to capture in his piece drift into the newsroom,” says the reporter who wishes Carr had named names. “Not even close. Not even close. Most of us are relative grown-ups.”
As for Kern, “I think he’s a guy who genuinely doesn’t like that kind of behavior, but didn’t allow himself to see it as long as it seemed to his benefit to ignore it. … If he pushed back at those guys—before the world was pushing back at them—they were likely to have pushed him out. Who wins then?” (I called Kern just before press time but didn’t reach him.) In other words, the complicated currents inside the newsroom—and beyond it, I suspect—weren’t done justice by “frat house.” But the phrase did its job. It was the kind of broad stroke that put the story on page one, guaranteed that everybody in the business would read it and talk about it, and made it a very bad time for Abrams to send the “sluts” memo that got him run off the premises—though not before the leadership of the Chicago Headline Club wrote a letter not only to the Tribune Company’s board and top executives but also to the bankruptcy court in Delaware denouncing “the culture of offensiveness that has marginalized women.” Here Kern finally spoke out. He said his paper was being “wrongly tarnished by the allegations against Tribune Co. executives and by actions such as Abrams’. The Chicago Tribune has nothing to do with any of it.” Tribune Company and the Tribune, he said, exercising a good leader’s license to alter reality in a crisis, “are two different organizations.”
