Tribune Company certainly won’t be happy about this one.
Beneath the headline, “At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture,” The New York Times’ David Carr takes to task Tribune Company Chairman Sam Zell and CEO Randy Michaels, accusing the two of spearheading a frat-house culture that celebrated lewdness in the workplace and engaged in corporate recklessness that put the company billions in debt and claimed the jobs of thousands.
“The new management did transform the work culture,” Carr writes. “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, jukeboxes and pervasive sex talk.”
The story quotes many former employees, several anonymously, who describe incidents that, to put it mildly, do not exactly paint the Tribune Co. executives in a favorable light.
Michaels, not one to sit and let such a story run in the Times without responding in kind, is trying to discredit Carr.
In a memo to Tribune staffers, first posted on Romenesko, the CEO writes, “Many of the questions Mr. Carr asked us for this article concerned events, distortions and rumors more than two years old. … Mr. Carr knows that an outside firm investigated the most substantial of these allegations, and that they were found to be without substance. Mr. Carr intends to use them anyway.”
In any case, it’s a good bet that Tribune’s lawyers will be poring through this one. Check out the Times’ story, here.
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