If all of the maximum performance standards were met, about $66 million would be paid out, far more than bonuses paid in the past, at a time when total revenue declined by $800 million.

At a hearing on the bonuses, a union accountant testified that if the maximum incentives were paid, they would eat up 15.5 percent of operating cash flow.

The bonus plan, which is an effort to replace awards of equity given to managers in the past, was announced in February, just about the time that the company was issuing memos about wage freezes and “shared sacrifice.” At a hearing in May on the previous year’s bonuses, which the bankruptcy judge granted, Mr. Bigelow said, “I will tell you that not being rewarded for hard work and hard effort is demotivating.”

Steve Lopez, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times, knows the feeling.

“We’ve got empty desks throughout the newsroom. Working journalists used to sit at them and serve up good stuff daily. Then there’s the issue of our bankruptcy,” he wrote in an e-mail message, adding, “Yeah, I’d have to say the brain trust was tone-deaf, to say the least, in handing out bonuses to the big dogs.”

In their motion in support of the plan, the Tribune’s lawyers said, “the debtors’ need to maintain these incentives for 2009 remains as strong as ever, as its key personnel are still being called upon to surmount significant industry and macroeconomic challenges while at the same time working diligently toward a successful reorganization.”

A company spokesman added that in spite of opposition from the unions and the trustee, “both our senior lender steering committee and the unsecured creditors committee support this plan as in the best interests of the future of the company.”

Joseph J. McMahon Jr., the acting trustee for the Tribune bankruptcy, does not agree and filed an objection to the plan on Aug. 4, writing that the threshold for such payments was high, and he cited relevant case law requiring that the bonuses had to be “essential to retention of the person because the individual has a bona fide job offer from another business at the same or greater rate of compensation.”