Emmy award-winning discuss present host Phil Donahue. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Photos cover caption
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Frederick M. Brown/Getty Photos
Phil Donahue united a broadcaster’s telegenic attraction, an insistent curiosity, and a style for provocative subjects to create a brand new style of tv – the viewers participation discuss present – which briefly took over daytime tv and sealed his standing as a TV pioneer. The broadcaster, who was age 88, died on Sunday, his household mentioned.
No explanation for dying was given, although his household mentioned he’d “handed away peacefully following a protracted sickness.”
However despite the fact that he constructed his legend on cheeky stunts, Donahue usually led earnest conversations on newsy subjects. From interviewing former Ku Klux Klan chief David Duke in 1991 as he was operating for governor of Louisiana to jousting with conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Donahue dug into hot-button points with the zeal of an investigative journalist – emulating the form of mainstream media figures who at all times impressed him.
“I grew up on this recreation with stars in my eyes,” Donahue mentioned in an interview with NPR in 2021. “I at all times admired mainstream media sorts. They went proper for the jugular. It appeared to me they didn’t need to be fashionable. They only needed to be aggressive and have their information straight.”
Donahue sat his friends earlier than a big studio viewers, stalking by way of the gang with a microphone, mixing questions from the onlookers along with his personal queries and – for a time – questions from callers over the phone.
The previous radio announcer lobbed questions with a down-to-earth appeal and a aptitude for dramatic pauses so distinctive that impressionist Darrell Hammond captured it on Saturday Night time Stay. One other SNL alum, Phil Hartman, truly lampooned him to his face in 1989.
One in every of Donahue’s improvements was that he spoke to a predominantly feminine TV viewers with out speaking all the way down to them, highlighting a single subject per present: atheism, abortion, racism.
The host himself mentioned controversy was the important thing to his present’s survival. “The coin of our realm is the scale of the viewers,” Donahue mentioned in a 2016 interview with the New York Public Media present MetroFocus. “What is going to draw a crowd, particularly to a visually uninteresting program? And we thought: Controversy. Controversy is what’s going to do it.”
Born Philip John Donahue in Cleveland, Ohio, he graduated from the College of Notre Dame and labored for a radio station in a small city in Michigan. “I might cease the Mayor of Adrian, Michigan within the hallway,” he instructed NPR in 2021. “I used to be, like 21 – I’ll have seemed 16 – and it was form of a first-grade lesson within the energy of journalism.”
In 1967, Donahue moved a radio discuss present he was internet hosting in Dayton, Ohio to native TV, and The Phil Donahue Present was born. His first visitor was famend atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair – who had introduced a lawsuit towards prayer in colleges — and some years later, his present was syndicated nationally, kicking off a 26-year run in daytime tv, largely with little competitors.
His mixture of hot-button subjects with earnest dialogue was so profitable that it was finally emulated by everybody from Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, and Morton Downey Jr. to Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey mentioned as a lot whereas handing Donahue a Lifetime Achievement Award on the Daytime Emmy Awards in 1996, noting, “Had there not been a Phil Donahue, I don’t assume there might have been an Oprah.”
Donahue, talking with the Archive of American Tv, mentioned he was at all times shocked nobody got here alongside to essentially strive copying what he did till Winfrey’s debut in 1986. “Alongside comes Oprah Winfrey, and it isn’t doable to overstate the enormity of her affect on the daytime tv recreation,” he mentioned. “In some ways, she raised all of the boats along with her success. When you didn’t have Oprah, you needed to have me. And we had been rather a lot inexpensive.”
Winfrey’s success led many different hosts to strive the format, with some that includes more and more combative and tawdry topics, together with fistfights onstage. As soon as thought-about outrageous himself, Donahue discovered his present crushed in scores by extra express packages and retired from daytime TV in 1996 after greater than 6,000 exhibits.
He wouldn’t return to a daily TV job till 2002 when he hosted a present for MSNBC referred to as Donahue. He tried emulating the fearless truth-telling he at all times idolized in mainstream journalism, however Donahue lasted lower than a yr there. He didn’t maintain again when telling NPR why it was canceled.
“I used to be fired as a result of I didn’t help the invasion of Iraq,” he added. “I believed I used to be going to be a success as a result of I used to be totally different. All people else was beating the conflict drums. I needed to get on the air and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’”
Donahue mentioned the firing primarily ended his TV profession. He did co-direct a 2007 documentary Physique of Battle and co-wrote a ebook in 2020 referred to as What Makes a Marriage Final with spouse and actress Marlo Thomas.
He married Thomas – a TV star, producer and outspoken feminist — in 1980 after assembly her when she was a visitor on his present.
