Friends don't let friends E-mail that

Once upon a time, Lee Abrams could program some mean radio.

Unfortunately, radio is finished. And so, it would seem, is Lee Abrams.

Lee's undoing was in trying to operate at a great big media company just like he would at Z-Rock. In 1976. Which is ironic, because Abrams' whole spiel at Tribune Co., and at XM satellite radio before that, was how everything had changed, it's a revolution out there, and you could either change or suffer the consequences.

Then Abrams, Trib's "chief innovation officer," goes and sends a Z-Rock memo -- circa Cheech and Chong and including links to some Not Safe for Work videos from The Onion -- to the whole company. Including the Chicago Tribune. With predictable results, as reported by the Tribune itself:

Lee Abrams, Tribune Co.’s chief innovation officer, has been placed on indefinite suspension without pay pending review of a company-wide memo he sent to staff Monday that spurred a rash of employee complaints.

Abrams apologized Tuesday “to everyone who was offended” by the e-mail that included a link to a video labeled “Sluts” that included female nudity. The incident followed by less than a week a New York Times front-page story that characterized Tribune Co. management as fostering a sexist “frat house” atmosphere.

“Lee recognizes that the video was in extremely bad taste and that it offended employees,” Tribune Chief Executive Randy Michaels said in the memo announcing the suspension. “But, this is the kind of serious mistake that can’t be tolerated; we intend to address it promptly and forcefully.”

Abrams may still face additional disciplinary action, Michaels said.

“As I said last week, a creative culture must be built on a foundation of respect,” Michaels said, referring to an Oct. 5 note sent to employees ahead of the New York Times piece. “Our culture is not about being offensive or hurtful. We encourage employees to speak up when they see or hear something that they find offensive, as a number of employees did with regard to this particular e-mail. I can assure you, you will be heard.

YOU WANT to know why some videos are called "Not Safe for Work"? It's because they're NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Included under NSFW are videos, no matter how pointedly satirical, that include a woman pouring booze over her bare breasts and an "anchor" saying “stay safe out there, and don’t f*** any of those sluts.”

Longtime Chicago media writer Robert Feder has to be soooooooo enjoying this:

Tuesday’s antics were sparked by a typically idiotic company-wide memo written the day before by Lee Abrams, chief innovation officer of Tribune Co. (and longtime crony of CEO Randy “Show Me Your Breasts” Michaels). Although it contained links to some videos that any normal person would consider outrageously inappropriate for the workplace — including one in which women identified as “sluts” were seen simulating lewd acts — Abrams’ memo was not much different than dozens of others he’d written since 2008.

But before the day was over, Abrams was forced to apologize publicly for what he called “poor judgment,” and ordered his offensive email deleted from company servers. What made this particular “think piece” from Abrams such a cause célèbre? Three things:

* Chicago Tribune editor Gerry Kern chose to make an issue of it, lodging complaints to the company’s human resources department and to Abrams directly, and then publicly declaring: “I thought it was offensive and I thought it was completely inappropriate to be sent out in a workplace setting to everyone in this company.”

* Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal broke the story of the controversial memo and of Kern’s reaction to it, further distancing the newspaper’s editorial department from the corporate suites of Tribune Tower. Embarrassing as it was, it also inoculated the paper from even greater embarrassment if the memo had been leaked elsewhere.

* Most significantly, it came just six days after a scathing, front-page story in The New York Times exposed the “bankrupt culture” of Tribune Co. under the ownership of Sam Zell and the leadership of Michaels and his cadre of radio rowdies, including Abrams. Reporter David Carr revealed in vivid detail what company employees (and, to a great extent, readers of this blog) had known for quite awhile — that the Tower had become a playground for management’s adolescent fantasies and a cesspool of “sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective.”

JUST A BIT AGO, I said Lee Abrams' undoing was trying to roll like he was at Z-Rock three-and-a-half decades ago. Actually, that was just one part of his undoing, and perhaps not the most significant.

A key part of his undoing was not believing in editing. Of any sort.

He spent his Tribune tenure spitballing ideas. Normally, this is good. But when every wet wad of random thought you're trying to stick to the wall begins its life cycle as a stream-of-consciousness, typo-riddled E-mail you send to the whole bloody company, you're going to get a reputation for being flaky.

People are going to stop taking you seriously. Not that Trib people ever took Abrams seriously in the first place, being that he came to a company built largely upon journalism from a gig as "chief creative officer" for a satellite-radio company. And before that, from creating radio formats like . . . Z-Rock, or whatever.

Traditional media is in a pickle these days. Incumbent upon any "chief innovation officer" trying to earn enough trust to actually begin innovating is, above all, not sounding like you took the pickle jar and turned it into a bong.

Or, as the Tribune-owned Baltimore Sun's tech reporter and blogger tweeted just after the news of Abrams' suspension broke:

Goodness.. spontaneous applause just broke out in the Sun newsroom on the news that Tribune's chief innovation officer was suspended.

OR . . . as one Tribune refugee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Dan Neil told Forbes today:

“No one could ever figure out what those Monday morning missives meant,” Neil told me today, referring to the “Think Pieces” Abrams regularly issued, the final one of which proved his undoing. “And all I can say is that at least one of them finally had a positive effect.”

“Abrams was supposed to be some sort of morale officer raising the spirits of the troops and rallying them to the cause, but the effects of his Monday morning missives was precisely the opposite,” he continued. “There was nothing more demoralizing than getting one of these badly written, garbled stoner notes and knowing that this guy was at the top of the organization you worked for.”

EXACTLY. Abrams was a dead man "innovating" long before he sent that highly ill-timed paean to inappropriateness and Randy Michaels threw him under the bus . . . which is kind of like Adolf Hitler indefinitely suspending Joseph Goebbels for being a Nazi.

This, of course, brings us to the A-No. 1 Bigtime Reason for the Undoing of Lee Abrams (and, by the way, this is NSFW):


LEE F***ED UP. He trusted Randy Michaels.

As a result, he became the noise everyone ignored.

Your Daily '80s: So much for the Iron Curtain

". . . and the Iron Curtain is probably no more."

The date: Nov. 9. 1989.

If you're too young to remember the Cold War, you can't possibly understand what an amazing sight this was. And how giddy we were.

Mr. Weatherwax, I'm ready for my close-up

Molly the Dog said she'd give me five (5) tasty dog treats if I posted a glamour shot of her magnificent self.

Hey! Don't knock it. Dog treats ain't bad, once you get used to 'em.

A little cardboardy, but just fine with salsa.

The campaign against epic a-holes

While gay and lesbian activists were busy politicizing bullying and telling America that stopping some bullying is more crucial than stopping the other 85 percent (or whatever) of bullying, this was playing itself out in Trenton, Mich.

Watch the video. Contemplate the sick, sick spectacle of the Neighbors From the Bowels of Hell ridiculing and harassing a dying 7-year-old girl, all because of a neighborhood feud. Consider going so far as to fill your yard with tombstones.

Picture hauling a fake coffin past the dying girl's house. In a pickup painted as a ghoulish hearse.

Imagine posting a picture of the dying child's dead mother in the arms of the Grim Reaper on your Facebook page. Which also features a picture of little Kathleen Edward's head replacing the skull in a skull and crossbones.

People all across the Detroit area, and all around the world, are outraged. They've been holding candlelight rallies at the girl's house.

And the tormentors, Scott and Jennifer Petkov, now are national pariahs.

FOR SOME REASON, the Petkovs now say they're sorry. Very, very sorry.




AS FAR as I know, the swift end to those bullies' reign of terror was not the work of the National Coalition to Stop the Torment of Dying Children. It was the work of "You don't do that to children. Period. Much less dying ones."

It was the work of "How dare you treat people that way?"

It was the work of "You're a couple of cruel scumbags, and now we're going to kick your miserable asses."

IT WAS the work of common human decency. Remember that?

If we want to stop bullying -- if we want to prevent tormented kids from killing themselves and all manner of societal awfulness -- maybe what we need is just a single campaign . . . a single advocacy group. Call it the Campaign for Common Decency.

Because, face it, common decency needs all the help it can get these days.

Your Daily '80s: It's a modern miracle, I tells ya!

Behold the Tandy 4000, available only at Radio Shack!

It's a price breakthrough for a business-class personal computer! Just $2,599!

A powerful 386 processor!

Runs at a blazing 16 MHz!

Ready for next-generation operating systems, like OS/2!

Will wonders never cease in this George Jetson world of 1988!

Igor's not allowed

Because you just don't get quality local TV like Dr. San Guinary and Creature Feature anymore, you just don't get quality outtakes like this one anymore, either.

In this clip from 1977, Doc explains why Igor is not allowed to associate with certain horror-movie monsters. It would be untoward, at a minimum.

Suicide: It's an equal-opportunity killer

In case you've forgotten, America -- and given the state of the American hype machine the past week or two, I think you may have -- being gay is not the only reason youth get bullied.

It is not the only reason they kill themselves.

And, frankly, I'm starting to get scared that people are getting the message that gay-bashing is the only bullying going on out there. I'm afraid everything else is going to get overlooked.


HOW ABOUT this, America? How about we stop the bullying -- and suicides -- of all youth? Gay, straight, fat, thin, geeky, brainiac, spazzy, dorkish, gimpoid, stuck-up, slutty, virginal, lame-o, klutzy, doofus and religious fanatic.

Let's help them all.

Let's protect them all.

Let's save them all.

At its root, teen bullying -- or any bullying, for that matter -- isn't because kids are gay (or fill-in-the-blank). It's because kids are different in some way, and adolescence is hell on "different."

It's easy as hell to become the Other when you're 15. Hell, it's easy enough when you're 50. We humans don't "do" Other very well.

I've seen kids catch hell for all kinds of reasons. And oftentimes, kids who catch holy, unrelenting hell end up hating themselves enough -- or wanting the pain to stop badly enough -- that they embrace the most permanent solution they can think of . . . for themselves, or for the pain.

THERE WAS a rash of teen suicides in Omaha about five years ago, bringing wider attention to a deadly trend across Nebraska. The deaths led the Omaha World-Herald to publish a huge, and excellent, series on the subject -- not that our short attention spans let us recall this.

Or recall that the teen deaths, while sometimes linked to bullying, rarely had anything to do with homosexuality.

I don't mean to minimize how badly gay kids get treated -- they often are treated horribly, and that is horribly wrong. And, indeed, sometimes the specific illustration can give us a good idea of the general picture.

Sometimes, the "little" story tells the bigger one in a manner we can wrap our brains around.

But in this case, I think it's possible that the smaller picture might end up obscuring the larger one.

And the life that costs may be your kid's.

OK, this is addictive

In case you missed it the first time around . . . 29 years ago . . . here's how the rest of that first hour of MTV went.

As we learned on Sunday's edition of Your Daily '80s, the first video played was from the Buggles. The first VJ was Mark Goodwin, but not really, because the videotapes of the VJ intros got mixed up, making Alan Hunter the first to introduce himself. But Goodman was the first to sit down and talk awhile.

Is that clear? Well, nothing has been too clear since 1981 anyway, so don't sweat it.

And you'll notice that the VJ intros weren't the only thing to get out of order that first hour. Keep watching.

Your Daily '80s: Video kills the radio star

Nah . . . just kidding.

Radio, as we all know, committed suicide. And you'll have to go to some lengths to find a music video on MTV today.

At any rate, we present a flashback to the launch of MTV on Aug. 1, 1981. OK, everybody knows the first video played on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." But what was the second?

Stay tuned and find out.

Your Daily '80s: Weird . . . even for Al

Mix "Weird Al" Yankovic and Japanese television . . . and you might -- might -- have the weirdest thing that happened in 1984.

My magic box . . . in search of magic

You want to hear some heavy metal?

Try going back to the fall of 1935. You'll find some heavy metal nestled inside the art-deco wooden case of the Zenith 5-S-29.

This heavy metal, though, was made to fill a room with dance-band remote broadcasts. With soap operas and farm reports. With news, and with exotic broadcasts from across the sea.

Today, an iPod will give you music. Yesterday, this old Zenith filled your house with magic.

I know. I sound like a broken record (another lost metaphor only fossils like me get). But if you ask me -- and you didn't . . . tough -- one of the tragedies of our age is the absence of magic.

Where is the magic in an iPod? Where is the magic in YouTube? Sure, YouTube is a great tool . . . and, in some cases, a forum for all manner of tools.

And sure, You Tube can offer up stuff you never could have imagined -- or perhaps imagined that you'd never see again.

But it's not magic.

Kind of like the iPod, a zillion websites, Facebook, Twitter and whatever they'll think of next. All useful. All interesting. All with the potential to while away countless hours.

But magic? No, not magic.

MAGIC IS a multicolored dial glowing in the dark. Magic is the five tubes inside an old Zenith tombstone radio casting a backlight glow, silhouetting the angles and curves of a wood-veneer case.

Magic is the rich sound of a six-inch speaker fed by heavy metal and hot filaments.

Magic is the smell of ozone wafting through the room

Magic is sitting by yourself, listing to mellifluous voices on distinguished radio stations in distant cities, each with its own distinctive "sound." Each beaming the life of a far away place, a distinct local culture into the ionosphere and then back to earth, into a long-wire aerial, through the circuitry and out the cone speaker of a 1936 model-year Zenith radio set.

Made in the U.S.A.

Sitting in a darkened room. Singing into your ear and speaking to your soul.

Your soul -- where the magic lies.

Messages from the souls of men and women of the mellifluous voices in far-away cities speaking into microphones and putting turntable needles into the grooves of discs filled with music. Wonderful music.

Once, there was music in the air. Once, real people played it. Once, real radio stations communicated to "radio neighbors."

Once, magic ruled the air. Once, magic came to you on a Zenith "long distance" radio.

Once. Once there be magic. Now . . . "T'aint so, McGee."

Now, my old Zenith searches for ethereal magic in the still of the night. It searches in vain.

Your Daily '80s: Original Omaha punks

On this edition of Your Daily '80s, we see the evolution of some original Omaha punks -- R.A.F.

Remember, they're not getting older; they're getting balder.

First, we see R.A.F. from a cable-access program, Underground Omaha, in 1985. Think of it this way, what we have here is a time capsule of old-school punk, second generation.


Then, we see R.A.F. in concert in 1991.


And, finally, a couple of years ago at the My Generation Punk Reunion Show, held at The Waiting Room in Benson. I wonder what their teenage kids thought?

F***in' A. Rock 'n' roll!

3 Chords & the Truth: Any damn thing

OK, we took a week off here at the Big Show, but now we're back playing any damn thing.

Look. Here's our business card. See?

Right here. It says "We play any damn thing." And that pretty much sums up 3 Chords & the Truth, with this week's episode being no exception to the "any damn thing" rule.

For example, this week, we play. . . . Hang on. That would ruin the surprise -- the whole sense of audio adventure, would it not?

THERE WOULD be no sense of discovery, no sense of unknown delights lurking just around the next segue, would there? If you knew every single thing that was coming, it would just be one 90-minute long anticlimax.

And if that's what you want, you can just listen to your local commercial FM station.

No, here at the Big Show, we're all about surprises and "any damn thing." Any damn thing, so long as it's good.

The bad, we don't mess with.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Your Daily '80s: High school radio, 1982

Do you remember rock 'n' roll radio?

Here's a little of how it went at North High School in Torrance, Calif. Or, we can put it this way . . .

Rock'n, rock'n'roll radio Let's go
Rock'n, rock'n'roll radio Let's go
Rock'n, rock'n'roll radio Let's go
Rock'n, rock'n'roll radio Let's go . . .

. . . to the wonderful world of 1982 at KNHS.

SADLY, KNHS left the airwaves in 1991. About all that survives of the voice of Torrance's North High -- at least that survives in cyberspace -- is this video. And the cache of a now-deleted history of the station on the school's entry on Wikipedia:

KNHS, was an FCC licensed FM radio station transmitting on 89.7 MHz, serving the Torrance, California area with a variety music format. KNHS was first licensed in the mid to late 1950s and ceased when a short-sighted TUSD allowed the station license to expire in 1991. The station originally broadcast with only one Watt and did not transmit with its full licensed power until 1972 when its studios and transmitter were moved to the second floor of the Industrial Arts building according to the High School newspaper The North Wind.

There was no professional management for the station and students of North High School ran the station, therefore the programming, educational value and financial earnings potential of the station was never realized. There was no engineer for the station except for a contract engineer who was only called on when something was known to be wrong.

In 1967, Mr. McKenzie managed KNHS activities, to include the broadcast operations, setting up and running the audio system for plays, and calling play-by-play for Saxon football games, sometimes even broadcasting from remote locations (other high schools). KNHS also had speakers at various parts of the campus, including the "quad," cafeteria, and other areas. During breaks and lunches, the speakers were turned on to let students hear the station. A "landmark" is the tower with the two omni-directional "halo" antennas at the top. The tower originally was above the old broadcast area by the cafeteria (a sound booth, the operations booth with a Gates audio console and Ampex tape recorders, and a music storage room). The theme song for basketball games was “Sweet Georgia Brown.” When KNHS moved in to the (then) new 2-story industrial arts building (with the auto repair area on the first floor), the antenna tower was also moved to the roof of the industrial arts building. Mr. Fields took over for Mr. McKenzie around the time KNHS moved to the industrial arts building. KNHS conducted monthly tests by turning on the transmitter and letting it stabilize, then a monitoring company was called to measure the frequency to comply with FCC regulations.

Can a Catholic swill that kind of tea?

Think Jesus Christ was a tea-party patriot?

Think again. And think about how much of Jesus' teaching you have to toss in the circular file in order to become a smaller-government, individual liberty above all and f*** the poor kind of political activist.

Unfortunately, lots of Catholics aren't thinking much at all. Many probably are even buying into Glenn Beck's raging phobia about social justice, this while claiming membership in a church centered on our oneness in the Body of Christ and a command -- not a suggestion -- that we exhibit a "preferential option for the poor."

To be succinct, polls indicate that bunches of Catholics are buying into the notion that everything they are obligated to believe -- and to put into practice -- is the kind of "socialism" that's bringing our country to ruin. Ironically, many of these conservative Catholics are just the sort of folk quick to condemn their liberal coreligionists as "cafeteria Catholics."

WELL, who's in the serving line now? Our Sunday Visitor shines some light on this:

Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, said that Catholic voters have been known for their propensity to switch party allegiance, but their strong show of support for the tea party comes as a surprise.

“What strikes me is that even though Catholics are attracted to this movement, there really is a pretty sharp tension between some of the basic teachings of the Church in regards to politics, the role of government and what we owe to the poor, and what these tea party advocates are promoting,” Schneck told Our Sunday Visitor.

Church teaching, he explained, has an inseparable link between rights and responsibilities for both the citizen and the government, with both having an eye toward promoting the common good. The tea parties, however, have argued for rights based on liberty, not responsibility.

“From that perspective it’s all about getting the government out of our lives and about citizens being free from the demands and needs of the country as a whole,” Schneck said. “Much as we might like otherwise, the Catholic argument is that government and citizen are equally expected to be our brother’s keeper.”

While the U.S. bishops have supported the idea of universal health care, tea party activists have commonly called for the repeal of Congress’ health care legislation. And positions argued by tea party activists on issues such as immigration, Social Security and the government’s regulation of racial discrimination by businesses don’t fit within the principles of Catholic social teaching, Schneck said.

“That kind of thinking is at odds with Catholic thinking about solidarity, about the common good and about the role that the political order should be playing in regards to the dignity of the human person,” he said. “So there’s actually quite a distance between what the tea party is advocating and the Church’s general understanding of how politics and governance should work.”

OF COURSE, there is dissent on the right.

According to Father Robert Sirico, president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, the radical extremists in the tea party represent only a small percentage on the fringes of the movement. At its heart, Father Sirico said, the tea party and its view of government are very close to the Church’s social teaching on the principle of subsidiarity, which favors doing things on a simplified level rather than leaving them to a more complex, centralized organization.

“I think the majority of the people who are involved in the tea party movement prefer things to be done at the most local level possible,” Father Sirico told OSV. “They are not against government in principle, they are against the excessiveness of government that we see, and that’s expressed in the principle of subsidiarity.”

AND WHILE Sirico allows that the tea party movement could learn something from Catholic teaching, he starts to sound like what Catholics on the right are so quick to condemn when it comes from the left. You've heard it before, as have I -- "How can a Catholic be a Democrat?"

It's a big cafeteria, people. Funny how tea-party "Catholics" could miss being right in the middle of it.

Please make sure you put away your tray when you're finished.

Obamma showinge his treu collors!!!

The following message is paid for by Outrage for Outrage's Sake 2010:

I think this videow showes the supposd "presiddente" Barak Hoosaine Obamma's treu collors!!! When the presiddentshul seel fell off the podiom, our Socshulist in Cheif thought it was funney!!!

"All of you no who I am." What arrogunce! Who does this Communiss impostur think he is? He thinkes he is funny and just has no respekt for the symmboles of our country!!!!!

This is bechuss, like a treu Muslin, he has no respekt for the offise of the presiddentcy and thinks America is a big Joke! THIS IS PRUFE THAT THIS MAN IS NOT A REEL AMERICAN-HE WAS BORN IN KENYUH!!!!!! He is juste like his Communiss African Father and thinks America is a Joke but thee last laufgh will be on him the Tea Party will take our Country back in thee elecshun!

And then thee peeople will overthrow his crooked Communiss dictator state in 2012!!!

Palin-O'Donnel 2012!!!!

Big Mike . . . Big Bad Mike

Long, long ago, this feller named Big Mike ruled the airwaves.

Well, actually, back in 1954, this other feller named Todd Storz was wiping the floor with Big Mike and KFAB in the Omaha ratings . . . but roll with me, here.

Anyway, Big Mike was a big, big radio station in the Midwest Empire, and everybody knew you didn't give no lip to Big Mike.

Big Bad Mike.

Then decades later came a rumble way down in the ground. And the smoke and gas belched out of the broker's office.

Everybody knew it was the end of the line for Big Mike.

Clear Channel.

Now they never reopened that worthless pit; they just put Rush and Beck in front of it. The carnival geeks just rant and rave, paying no mind they stand on a grave.

Because at the bottom of this pit lies a big big man. Big Mike.


(With apologies to the late Jimmy Dean, and with gratitude to the archivist of wonderful old issues of Broadcasting magazine.)

Your Daily '80s: How'd that work out for you?

Dear Church Lady:

Are you less offended by television today than you were 30 years ago?

No?

Well, I guess you wasted all that money you sent to the Moral Majority and the National Federation for Decency, then.

Broadcasting magazine, back in December 1980, was reporting on this big effort by the champions of decency to, no doubt, demonstrate through better polling that the masses were with them in opposing televised smut. And, as we saw over the intervening decades, there was much heated rhetoric.

THERE WERE many "pro-family" Republican politicians elected.

In the White House, we had eight years of Reagan and 12 years from the family Bush.

We've had boycotts.

We've had protests.

We've had crackdowns on the F-word. And the S-word.

We even had a gigantic "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl burlesque halftime show.

AND WHAT we've gotten from the networks and cable, lo, these many years hence, is televised fare that the horrified legions for decency could not have imagined in their worst nightmares in those waning days of the Carter presidency.

Culture precedes politics, and TV fare. It precedes polling and boycotts, too.

The trouble, dear Brutus, was not in the networks, but in the networks giving the people what they wanted. The only thing that could fix that, alas, was the Good News that good, Christian people were forgetting to proclaim while they were all on the picket line bewailing the Bad News.

The National Buffoon's Tribune House

Before Tuesday, there was a little bit left of the Tribune Co., after Sam Zell bought it and hired Randy Michaels to turn it into Delta House.

The bankruptcy judges had been trying to make sure of that.

Now, the carcass of a once-respected media empire pretty much has been obliterated by this story in The New York Times. The Gray Lady did to Michaels' corporate toga party what Dean Wormer wanted to do to the Deltas, but couldn't pull off.

And then, to add insult to nuclear annihilation, the Times informs the Tribune crew that "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life."

YOU WON'T believe it until you read it. And even then, maybe not:

In January 2008, soon after the venerable Tribune Company was sold for $8.2 billion, Randy Michaels, a new top executive, ran into several other senior colleagues at the InterContinental Hotel next to the Tribune Tower in Chicago.

Mr. Michaels, a former radio executive and disc jockey, had been handpicked by Sam Zell, a billionaire who was the new controlling shareholder, to run much of the media company’s vast collection of properties, including The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, WGN America and The Chicago Cubs.

After Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, “watch this,” and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded.

“Here was this guy, who was responsible for all these people, getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew,” said one of the Tribune executives present, who declined to be identified because he had left the company and did not want to be quoted criticizing a former employer. “I have never seen anything like it.”

Mr. Michaels, who otherwise declined to be interviewed, said through a spokesman, “I never made the comment allegedly attributed to me in January 2008 to a waitress at the InterContinental Hotel, and anyone who said I did so is either lying or mistaken.”

It was a preview of what would become a rugged ride under the new ownership. Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels, who was promoted to chief executive of the Tribune Company in December 2009, arrived with much fanfare, suggesting they were going to breathe innovation and reinvention into the conservative company.

By all accounts, the reinvention did not go well. At a time when the media industry has struggled, the debt-ridden Tribune Company has done even worse. Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase, while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed.

The new management did transform the work culture, however. Based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels’s and his executives’ use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company. Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the staid company, came to resemble a frat house, complete with poker parties, juke boxes and pervasive sex talk.

The company said Mr. Michaels had the support of the board.

“Randy is a tremendous motivator, very charismatic, but he is very nontraditional,” said Frank Wood, a member of the Tribune board. “He has the kind of approach that motivates many people and offends others, but we think he’s done a great job.”

The company is now frozen in what seems to be an endless effort to emerge from bankruptcy. (The case entered mediation in September after negotiations failed, and a new agreement between two primary lenders was recently announced.) But even as the company foundered, the tight circle of executives, many with longtime ties to Mr. Michaels, received tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.

And while many media companies tried cost-cutting and new tactics in the last few years, Tribune was particularly aggressive in planning publicity stunts and in mixing advertising with editorial material. Those efforts alienated longtime employees and audiences in the communities its newspapers served.

“They threw out what Tribune had stood for, quality journalism and a real brand integrity, and in just a year, pushed it down into mud and bankruptcy,” said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting firm. “And it’s been wallowing there for the last 20 months with no end in sight.”

Mr. Zell has acknowledged that the deal has not turned out how he hoped. But noting a recent upturn in results, he said through a spokesman, “Tribune has made significant strides in becoming a current, competitive and sustainable media company. The measure of management’s performance is reflected in the increased profitability of Tribune’s media properties.”

NO, SAM, deals rarely turn out like you hoped when you pay too much for properties with too much borrowed money, then put arrested-development corporate scumbags in charge to create a toxic work environment in the name of "creativity," while systematically jettisoning human capital and laying waste to whatever value Tribune's media products once had.

Hang on, though. It gets better, which means worse.

Mr. Michaels, who was initially in charge of Tribune’s broadcasting and interactive businesses as well as six newspapers, was a former shock jock who made a name for himself — and a lot of money for Mr. Zell — by scooping up radio stations while at the Zell-controlled Jacor Communications. Jacor was later sold to Clear Channel Communications for $4.4 billion.

In turn, Mr. Michaels remade Tribune’s management, installing in major positions more than 20 former associates from the radio business — people he knew from his time running Jacor and Clear Channel — a practice that came to be known as “friends and family” at the company.

One of their first priorities was rewriting the employee handbook.

“Working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you, personally, might not use,” the new handbook warned. “You might experience an attitude you don’t share. You might hear a joke that you don’t consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, nonlinear atmosphere is important to the creative process.” It then added, “This should be understood, should not be a surprise and not considered harassment.”

The new permissive ethos was quickly on display. When Kim Johnson, who had worked with Mr. Michaels as an executive at Clear Channel, was hired as senior vice president of local sales on June 16, 2008, the news release said she was “a former waitress at Knockers — the Place for Hot Racks and Cold Brews,” a jocular reference to a fictitious restaurant chain.

A woman who used to work at the Tribune Company in a senior position, but did not want to be identified because she now worked at another media company in Chicago, said that Mr. Michaels and Marc Chase, who was brought in to run Tribune Interactive, had a loud conversation on an open balcony above a work area about the sexual suitability of various employees.

“The conversation just wafted down on all of the people who were sitting there.” She also said that she was present at a meeting where a female executive jovially offered to bring in her assistant to perform a sexual act on someone in a meeting who seemed to be in a bad mood.

Staff members who had concerns did not have many options, given the state of the media business in Chicago, the woman said. “Not many people could afford to leave. The people who could leave, did. But it was not in my best interest to have my name connected to an E.E.O.C. suit,” she said, referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Indeed, there are no current E.E.O.C. complaints against the Tribune Company.)

There have been complaints about Mr. Michaels in the past, however. In 1995, Mr. Michaels and Jacor settled a suit brought by Liz Richards, a former talk show host in Florida who filed an E.E.O.C. complaint and a civil suit, saying she had been bitten on the neck by Mr. Michaels and that he walked through the office wearing a sexual device around his neck.

“They were like 14-year-old boys — no boundaries at all — but with money and power,” Ms. Richards said in an interview.

THIS COMPORTS with Michaels' reputation in radio. And anyone who thought that one of the middle-aged juveniles who helped destroy radio broadcasting would do the opposite in a field they knew even less about . . . well, we need a hit of whatever he's smoking.

Especially after reading that New York Times piece.

Your Daily '80s: On the radio

The hits kept comin' in Vancouver on CFMI, FM 101.1. Here's the way it was 30 years ago, on Oct., 1, 1980.