Kevin Metheny, Jim Laski out at WGN-AM

Station bids adieu to polarizing program director and his most controversial hire

November 11, 2010|By Phil Rosenthal | Media


Out with Metheny is perhaps his most controversial hire, Jim Laski, the former city clerk of Chicago, who served time on a federal felony bribe conviction and had been hosting a weeknight gabfest on the station since April.

Metheny's departure follows by less than three weeks the resignation of veteran radio executive Randy Michaels as chief executive of Tribune Co., parent of WGN-AM as well as the Chicago Tribune. Like several other executives who have left the company since the CEO's departure, Metheny enjoyed the support of Michaels, who had recruited and installed him in Chicago.

The station said a series of hosts will fill in for Laski, whose show aired weeknights at 7 when not pre-empted by Chicago Blackhawks hockey or other sports play-by-play, until a new program is announced. Newsman Steve Bertrand went on the air Thursday as the first substitute, just a couple hours after the announcement.

"The next step in the station's evolution is the development of a show (in Laski's old three-hour slot) that best complements the rest of our evening programming, something on which we will be very focused going forward," Tom Langmyer, the station's vice president and general manager since 2005, said in making public the changes. "Our goal is to continue developing engaging and relevant programming while still keeping the hometown connection that Chicagoans have come to identify with WGN."

Hiring Laski, a pugnacious radio novice, was emblematic of the moves by Metheny that incensed those who longed to preserve what for many years had been a nonconfrontational broadcast outlet. That Laski supplanted the long-running "Sports Central" program only compounded the resentment, although the 28-year WGN-AM mainstay had lost its primacy with the advent and growth of all-sports stations WSCR-AM 670 and WMVP-AM 1000.

Even before his arrival at what brands itself News 720 WGN-AM, Metheny had a reputation for rubbing some the wrong way.

He was immortalized as "Pig Virus" by former colleague Howard Stern, first on the air and in his best-selling book "Private Parts," and then caricatured as part of the basis for a meddling composite character called "Pig Vomit" in the movie version of the memoir. The movie character, played by Paul Giamatti, is depicted as a micromanaging martinet who obsesses over the pronunciation of the station's call letters.

That reputation was in no way contradicted when Metheny's attempts to advise longtime WGN-AM midday hosts Kathy O'Malley and Judy Markey on the kind of show he wanted from them ultimately resulted in their sudden exit from the station in May 2009.

Even many of those who might have supported the cancellation of "The Girlfriends" and other changes Metheny made in response to lagging ratings in the station's main day parts thought those moves could and should have been handled more gracefully. Instead, they fed a sense that he had the 86-year-old broadcasting institution changing too much, too fast, with little regard for its storied history and the listeners who had been part of it.

Langmyer, in his statement, noted that Metheny's legacy included a "solidified" daytime lineup that includes San Francisco import Greg Jarrett , Cincinnati recruit Mike McConnell and Chicago veteran Garry Meier, all hired in the last 18 months, as well as John Williams.

One move Metheny ultimately didn't make was to hire provocative radio firebrand Bill Cunningham, whom Tribune Co. has signed to host a syndicated TV show and who, like McConnell, used to work with Michaels in Cincinnati, despite a courtship this summer that ended with Cunningham choosing to remain in Ohio.

Cunningham's politically charged program would have distanced WGN-AM even more from its past and those who cherished it.

Laski was tough enough to swallow. He went to prison after admitting he accepted nearly $50,000 to steer city trucking business to cronies. Some of those who might have forgiven that transgression were unable to overlook his argumentative, unpolished style.


Both now are where their harshest critics want them to be: Gone.