Outside the Beltway

Phil Donahue, 1935-2024

The talk show pioneer is gone at 88.

James Joyner · Tuesday, August 20, 2024 · 1 comment

Clyde Haberman, New York Times, “Phil Donahue, Talk Host Who Made Audiences Part of the Show, Dies at 88“

Phil Donahue, who in the 1960s reinvented the television talk show with a democratic flourish, inviting audiences to question his guests on topics as resolutely high-minded as human rights and international relations, and as unblushingly lowbrow as male strippers and safe-sex orgies, died on Sunday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by Susan Arons, a representative of the family.

“The Phil Donahue Show” made its debut in 1967 on WLWD-TV in Dayton, Ohio, propelling Mr. Donahue on a 29-year syndicated run, much of it as the unchallenged king of daytime talk television.

Almost from the start, “The Phil Donahue Show” dispensed with familiar trappings. There was no opening monologue, no couch, no sidekick, no band — just the host and the guests, focused on a single topic.

At the time, audiences were expected to be seen and not heard, unless prompted to applaud. Mr. Donahue changed that. He quickly realized from chatting with audience members during commercial breaks that some of them asked sharper questions than he did. And so he began his practice of stalking the aisles, microphone in hand, and letting those in the seats have their say. He also opened the telephone lines to those watching at home. Electronic democracy, as some called it, had arrived.

Few subjects, if any, were off limits for Mr. Donahue, who was said to have told his staff, “I want all the topics hot.” It mattered little that at times the subjects made some viewers, and local station managers, squirm. His very first guest was guaranteed to stir controversy: Madalyn Murray O’Hair, at the time America’s most famous, and widely unpopular, atheist.

Across the years — he moved from Dayton to Chicago in 1974, and then to New York in 1985 — he interviewed presidential candidates and Hollywood stars, consumer advocates and feminist pioneers. He also televised a child’s birth, an abortion, a reverse vasectomy and a tubal ligation. From inside a maximum-security prison in Ohio, he examined the American penal system. He was among the first television hosts to explore the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and the first Western journalist to go to Chernobyl, in Ukraine, after the 1986 nuclear accident there.

And there was sex, lots of it — more and more as the years passed. Not every conversation qualified as lofty discourse, not with Mr. Donahue donning a dress and stockings to study cross-dressing, or interviewing lesbian go-go dancers, or exploring the merits of dressing up like a baby for sexual pleasure.

He offered no apologies for his frequent traipses down the low road. “This is a medium that rewards popularity, and I don’t want to be a dead hero,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “Besides, it doesn’t do any good to talk if nobody’s listening.”

Mr. Donahue was an ardent feminist as far back as the late 1960s. Critics detected a healthy measure of self-satisfaction about him. But admirers tended to agree with Nora Ephron’s assessment in her 1983 novel, “Heartburn.” “If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue,” she wrote, “he would never have wondered what women want.”

By the mid-1990s, Mr. Donahue had fallen victim to a fatal disease for any television star: low ratings. Once unassailable, he tumbled to 13th place in the Nielsen ratings for daytime talk shows. As early as the mid-’80s he had been overtaken by the unstoppable force known as Oprah Winfrey. But others came along, too. Hosts like Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael catered to brows far lower than even those Mr. Donahue increasingly sought as his audience. “My illegitimate children,” Mr. Donahue called those interviewers. Struggling to keep up, he called it quits in 1996.

Fred A. Bernstein, The Washington Post, “Phil Donahue, long-reigning king of daytime television, dies at 88.”

Phil Donahue, the host for nearly 30 years of a daytime television talk show that explored the serious and the salacious, popularizing a breezy format — with audience members asking questions and offering opinions — that opened the door to successors and rivals including Oprah Winfrey, died Aug. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

[…]

On Mr. Donahue’s first day, the station had already invited a studio audience for the variety show that his program replaced, and he decided to let the crowd stay.

He chatted with audience members during commercial breaks and often liked what he heard. So one day, while on the air, “I jumped out of the chair and went into the audience,” he told NPR years later. “That moment is what … subsequently made the program different, and absorbing enough to hold a viewer for an hour.”

From that point on, Mr. Donahue, whose bright blue eyes and flying shirttails made him seem boyish — even after his dark hair turned prematurely white — was known for running up and down aisles with a microphone to seek comments from audience members, the vast majority of whom were women.

[…]

By 1979, the show was reaching 9 million viewers, nearly 8 million of them female. A Newsweek cover story from that time about Mr. Donahue described him as possessing “an intuitive ability to place himself in his audience’s head and ask the questions they would ask.” But he could be intrusive. Newsweek reported that when “a trio of female impersonators” talked about their work, Mr. Donahue “broke in with: ‘Let me ask you this — where do you guys go to the bathroom?’ The audience applauded.”

[…]

In 1987 he taped five episodes of “Donahue” in the Soviet Union, using a satellite hookup to connect viewers in the rival superpowers. He was among the first TV hosts to address the issue of sexual abuse by priests. (A self-described “lapsed Catholic,” Mr. Donahue once told Knight Ridder Newspapers that “organized religion has been very unfair to God.”)

Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1990, author Dennis McDougal praised Mr. Donahue for his “razor-sharp, no-nonsense probing of Watergate figures, foreign dignitaries and Love Canal environmental malefactors during the 1970s.” Mike Douglas, the host of a frothier daytime talk show, told Newsweek: “He works like a crack attorney in front of the jury box.” Donahue won a Peabody Award in 1980 for his “ability to ask the tough questions without seeming to offend” and his “innate sense of honesty.”

[…]

He also earned a shelf’s worth of Emmy Awards, and in May he visited the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“He helped change hearts and minds through honest and open dialogue,” President Joe Biden said at the time. “And over the course of a defining career in television and through thousands of daily conversations, Phil Donahue steered the nation’s discourse and spoke to our better angels.”

Mr. Donahue never claimed to be impartial. He was an ardent liberal — his most frequent guest was Ralph Nader, whose presidential campaign he later supported. He belonged to the National Organization for Women, attributing what he described as his sexism early in life to his religious education.

“We were so busy trying to avoid sin that we could never make friends with women, never share ideas, never care how they felt,” he told TV Guide in 1978.

Mr. Donahue moved his show to Chicago in 1974, and, 11 years later, he relocated once again, to New York, to be near his second wife, actress Marlo Thomas. For years, Mr. Donahue was a regular contributor to NBC’s “Today Show” and was talked about as a possible anchor. But his talk show lost viewers as he began to face imitators including Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael.

[…]

In 2002, Mr. Donahue came out of retirement to host a show on MSNBC, in direct competition with conservative host Bill O’Reilly’s program on Fox News. Mr. Donahue, an opponent of the war in Iraq and holder of other antiestablishment views, was ready to take the gloves off. As he told Winfrey in an interview for her magazine, “I’m not 29 anymore, my wife isn’t pregnant, I’m not trying to raise kids, I don’t have a mortgage — so it takes less courage for me to speak up.”

But the network canceled the show the next year, blaming low ratings. A leaked memo later revealed that some executives considered Mr. Donahue a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” He said he was ordered to bring on two conservative guests for every liberal.

My mom was a huge fan of these daytime talk shows, so I saw a whole lot of Donahue over the years. We weren’t aligned politically and he could at times come off as rather arrogant, but he was a master of what he did.

I had forgotten that he had the evening show at MSNBC. I remember watching it, which was at the tail end of the period when I still watching talking heads with some regularity. I generally found him to be a thoughtful guy, even though I generally disagreed with him on the issues.