Wow. Chi Trib is on its way to bigger and better things, as is clear from this Steve Rhodes piece for the NBC Chicago blog which was deleted by its high muck-a-mucks after Chi Trib complained, after which Rhodes quit, after which he wrote about it.
The offending item, deleted but Google-cached, remains for all to see, and let this be a lesson to legacy media moguls coast to coast: You get more bad publicity by pulling strings than by ignoring things.
It’s for all to see at the cached site, but here ‘tis in toto as a public service:
Tribune’s New CEO Has a Shocking Past
Zell steps aside for old friend
By STEVE RHODES
Updated 12:54 PM CST, Thu, Dec 3, 2009
Sam Zell is leaving control of Tribune Company in the hands of a former shock jock who used to tell jokes about gay people on the air and reportedly roamed the offices of a past employer with a rubber penis tied around his neck.
That would be Randy Michaels, Zell’s chief lieutenant at Tribune and now the once-staid media institution’s CEO, a post Zell abdicated on Wednesday. Zell will remain chairman of the company to provide, you know, a strategic vision until Tribune gets out of bankruptcy. Then Zell will probably be gone.
Michaels, however, reportedly wants to stay. What a nice gift that would be for Zell to leave behind.
Michaels is known for, among other things, believing he is the first to measure reporters’ productivity by the number of words they produce and actually believing that is a legitimate way to measure a reporter’s productivity. That and a lawsuit that once alleged – among other things – that he roamed his old Clear Channel offices with a “flexible rubber penis” tied around his neck as well as a host of other crude rituals. The suit was settled.
As an executive with Clear Channel, Michaels was “an effective but tasteless programmer,” according to Salon.
“Behind the mike he made a name for himself back in the ’70s and ’80s farting on the air, cracking jokes about gays and tantalizing listeners with descriptions of ‘incredibly horny, wet and ready’ naked in-studio guests,” the Salon account reports.
Michaels is “well regarded by the creditors who are expected to control Tribune when it emerges from bankruptcy protection next year,” the New York Times reports.
Michaels, whose real name is Benjamin Homel, was once described as the AntiChrist of radio. He told Radio Ink magazine that “We’d all prefer to be liked, so of course it bothers me. I think I personify uncomfortable change in our business for a lot of people.”
Or at least a certain kind of change.
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
Copyright NBC Local Media
First Published: Dec 3, 2009 9:09 AM CST
See also
* WBEZ blog, which has an interview with Rhodes
* “With Both Hands” on the same subject.
Blithe Spirit 
“Sam Zell is leaving control of Tribune Company in the hands of a former shock jock who used to tell jokes about gay people on the air and reportedly roamed the offices of a past employer with a rubber penis tied around his neck.”
Rhodes’ lede was clearly meant to induce rage among his pc brigade comrades, and foment a movement to get Michaels/Homel fired. “He’s a homophobe! Kill him!”
This is hardcore activism and editorializing, without even the thinnest veneer of journalism. But hey, if Rhodes’ charges are true, I say: Big darned deal.
I have no compassion for the Tribune Company, however. Assuming he isn’t lying, who would want to silence a jerk like Rhodes?
Full disclosure: I am negatively predisposed towards Steve Rhodes, whose favorite Chicago propagandist, as far as I can see, is black supremacist Sun-Times columnist, Mary Mitchell, and who is as honesty-deficient as she is.
During the Fred Hampton Way debacle, Rhodes supported a street sign for the cop-killer, er, victim of murderous police, and cited no less than Mitchell as an authority on the matter.
http://www.beachwoodreporter.com/column/the_tuesday_papers_1.php
March 7, 2006
http://www.beachwoodreporter.com/column/the_thursday_papers_8.php
April 27, 2006
Citing Mitchell, Rhodes argued that critics of Hampton had it all wrong, when they charged that the November 13, 1969 murder of white patrolmen John Gilhooly Jr. and Frank Rappaport, and wounding of seven other CPD policemen by Hampton’s Black Panthers, Spurgeon “Jake” Winters , Lawrence (Lance) Bell, and one or more John Does was a premeditated ambush. Apparently, the Panthers were planning on murdering a black prison guard that night, when Gilhooly and Rappaport came along, responding to a phone call by a friend and neighbor of the guard’s wife, they fell into the Panthers’ laps. (The guard was in hiding for the night.)
(Winters is believed to have murdered Gilhooly and Rappaport; police chased him down, and shot him dead that night.)
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/panthers_print.htm
But not even that story line is enough for Rhodes, who goes so far as to claim,
“The evidence presented so far suggests the incident had nothing to do with the Black Panther Party.”
I have no idea what evidence Rhodes was talking about, and likewise doubt that this journalistic hero, who relies on Mary Mitchell as an authority, did.
More Rhodes:
“Isn’t it interesting that the story is now about the Black Panthers supposedly killing two (white) Chicago police officers and no longer about the police assassinating two (black) Black Panthers?
“Is the picture becoming clearer?”
“Supposedly”? So, now the Panthers didn’t even kill Gilhooly and Rappaport. What will he say next? That the CPD murdered them, just so that it would have an excuse to kill Hampton and Clark? (The Panthers actually did claim that the CPD “ambushed” Winters!) Rhodes sounds as insanely dishonest as your average Panther supporter. Then again, he is a Panther supporter!
Here’s a bit of evidence Rhodes didn’t talk about: Fred Hampton’s favorite phrase, which he constantly uttered to his troops, was “Off the pigs!”
Hampton, a charismatic terrorist leader, told his followers to murder policemen, and they did as he told them. Case closed.
As for Hampton and his top henchman, Mark Clark, being “victims” of a police assassination, when police smashed into their apartment in the wee hours of December 3, 1969, and shot them dead, here’s my take.
The one point on which I agree with Rhodes is that the police assassinated Hampton and Clark (20 days after the murders of Gilhooly and Rappaport). Unlike Rhodes, however, I consider that assassination to have been one of the most righteous extrajudicial killings in American history, and the recently deceased Edward Hanrahan to be an American hero of the first rank. We will never know how many lives Hanrahan’s Raid saved. If only we’d had more men like him.
The Panthers were, by their own admissions, waging war on America. When you wage war on a nation, you lose the right to be treated as an ordinary criminal. As Justice Jackson said, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
And yet, there are Laws of War. Among other offenses, the Panthers did not wear insignia, showing that they were combatants, often concealed their weapons, and of course, were not members of any nation formally at war with us, or which had signed on to the Geneva Conventions, or in any other way respected the Laws of War. (Their claims to be at war were contradicted by their constant claims of being “murdered” and “ambushed,” and manipulations of the legal system, all of which marked them as pathetic cowards.)
Thus, they were unlawful combatants, and not entitled to any of the protections of lawful combatants. Hanrahan’s Raid was an act of war, but Hanrahan didn’t start the war. If the Panthers weren’t man enough for war, they shouldn’t have played at it.
Methinks that Rhodes is bitter over all the lost opportunities for murder and mayhem that Hanrahan’s Raid cost the Chicago Panthers.
If Rhodes quit NBC, something tells me that he’s got something else lined up. This is not a man who lives and dies for the truth.
As far as Steve Rhodes is concerned, genocidal black supremacists, including cop-killers, are heroes, but a white guy who 30 years ago told gay jokes and walked around with a rubber penis around his neck, is an enemy of society, and must be destroyed.
Either Rhodes is a lying, genocidal black supremacist, or he’s a lying, white communist who gladly makes common cause with lying, genocidal black supremacists. I leave it to the reader, to decide which is worse.
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No doubt Michaels et Trib will soon seek government bailout and we will be paying this foul mouth.
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He won’t grow up, he won’t grow up, he will never grow up.
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The Chicago Police murdered Black men and children before 1969 and after 1969. You cannot expect people to sit idle when your family members are being killed. Unless of course you cannot relate to being terrorized by Chicago or any police in this country. Some people have no understanding or compassion if their reality doesn’t require self-determination.
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“Children,” indeed. Let’s see: Translating that out of “ebonics,” that means any black cut-throat under the age of 40.
“… compassion if their reality doesn’t require self-determination.”
Oh, but my reality absolutely requires freedom and self-government, concepts which are foreign to you. However, your use of the phrase, “self-determination,” when speaking of a group within a self-governing nation makes transparent that you are talking about a race war. How could I possibly have “understanding or compassion” for people trying to commit genocide against my race and nation? You and your comrades are not just cowardly and evil, but stupid, too.
Cowardly: Because you wage a guerilla war, and then whine about “rights” and “racism.” Under the laws of war, guerillas have no rights. Evil: Your life revolves around sadism and murder. Stupid: Your entire being consists of nothing but genocidal racism, yet you complain about whites who want nothing more than to left the heck alone by you and yours. Oh, and let me add dishonest: You don’t want “self-determination”; you want to leech off of whites for all eternity.
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