Sam Zell … dead

What's often forgotten in the "Zell killed Tribune" narrative is that Tribune was ALREADY $4 billion in debt because of the $8 billion Times-Mirror purchase back in 2000.

So Tribune DID take on a ton of debt --- right before the dot.com crash --- and survived it before Zell came along, albeit with a drag on the stock price and some cuts, most notably at the bloated L.A. Times with its newsroom of 1,200.

My contention is that if Zell buys Tribune in, say, 1997, he doesn't turn around and buy Times-Mirror three years later --- so his $8 billion (or whatever it would have been in 1997) purchase would have been the ONLY debt on Tribune's books. There would have been no additional $8 billion T-M debt. Tribune was still printing money like crazy back then, and even was highly profitable after the dot.com crash. And it would have been a private company --- no shareholder expectations and no sagging stock price.

The tax savings from Zell's plan could have been a huge boon --- and may have prevented the crippling $900 million hit the company took in 2005 when it lost a U.S. Tax Court ruling from a 1998 tax-free reorganization. It would not have stopped the eventual crumbling of the company, but it could have put it in a far better position than just about any other.