Earlier than there was Jerry Springer there was Phil Donahue. Donahue, who has died aged 88, took the talkshow format into the viewers, a tactic that paved the best way for a small herd of daytime programmes. As Oprah Winfrey mentioned in 2018: “If it weren’t for Phil Donahue, there would by no means have been an Oprah Present.”
Oprah’s acknowledgment mirrored Donahue’s maintain over daytime tv’s major viewers: girls. His programmes typically addressed critical and even controversial matters, introduced with moderation and with out rancour, combined with typically salacious discussions of intercourse and relationships, the attention-grabbing stuff that turned the ever-present fodder for a relentless drive to the underside of {the marketplace} for hosts Donahue known as “my illegitimate kids” – Jenny Jones, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Montel Williams or Ricki Lake.
However Donahue averted pandering to housewives; he took his core viewers severely. “There may be sexism and paternalism amongst [those] who determine what will get in,” he mentioned in 1979. “The lads who run tv nonetheless grossly underestimate the American girl.” At his peak, Donahue may declare his present, syndicated to greater than 200 stations, attracted near 9 million viewers, together with as a lot as 90% of feminine watchers.
Donahue’s formulation, like his profession, concerned some serendipity. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the place his father, Philip, was a furnishings salesman and his mom, Catharine (nee McClory), offered sneakers in a division retailer. He attended St Edward, a Catholic boys’ highschool in suburban Lakewood. On the College of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, he broadcast on the campus radio station, WNDU and labored summers as an assistant at KYW in Cleveland.
After graduating with a level in enterprise administration, he married his school sweetheart, Marge Cooney, in 1958, and labored for a short while in a financial institution in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. However he needed to be a broadcaster, and he took a job as programme director with WABJ in Adrian, Michigan. This led to a job because the morning information anchor on WHIO in Dayton, Ohio, the place he scored vital telephone interviews with controversial figures such because the Teamsters’ union head Jimmy Hoffa and Billie Sol Estes, the important thing determine in Texas corruption scandals involving Lyndon Johnson. In 1963 Donahue hosted a day talkshow, Dialog Piece, which lasted 4 years.
Nonetheless, he felt annoyed, and briefly give up to work as a salesman for a Inexperienced Protect-style buying and selling stamp firm. However inside months the Phil Donahue Present debuted on Dayton’s WLWD-TV, owned by Cincinnati’s Crosley’s Broadcasting.
Donahue rapidly understood the restrictions of the TV studio. A telephone interview with a radio station was one factor, however getting big-name topics to journey to Dayton was one other. So he restricted his exhibits to only one visitor, one subject, and invited questions from the viewers. His very first visitor was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a distinguished atheist whose case in opposition to obligatory prayer in public (ie state) colleges, led to a supreme courtroom ruling confirming separation of church and state. He realised that the topic, deemed controversial, drew an enormous response due to its significance to his viewers, whom he perceived as typically asking questions extra probing than his personal.
Donahue’s impression was fast. Crosley started syndicating the present to their 44 stations within the midwest, and it started to be picked up nationwide. In 1974, retitled merely Donahue, it moved to the studios of WGN in Chicago, and in 1976 was purchased by Multimedia, who moved it to New York in 1985. Alongside his personal present’s success, within the 80s Donahue appeared in common segments of NBC’s Community breakfast present, In the present day, and afterward ABC’s late evening The Final Phrase.
His first marriage resulted in divorce in 1975. In 1977, he interviewed Marlo Thomas, the star of That Woman, a preferred comedy, and creator of the bestselling report and guide Free To Be … You And Me, which promoted gender-neutrality. They married in 1980. Donahue was one of many first broadcasters to deal with the Aids pandemic, in a 1982 symposium that featured the screenwriter Larry Kramer. Total, he gained 10 Daytime Emmy awards, together with a lifetime achievement award, as finest host, and a Primetime Emmy for his 1981 particular Donahue and Youngsters, together with survivors of life-threatening diseases. And he took half in a programme known as the US-Soviet House Bridge, which featured stay studio hook-ups of his present in America with one hosted by Vladimir Pozner in Russia. It turned a daily present, Pozner/Donahue, syndicated from 1991 to 1994.
By that point, nevertheless, Donahue’s share of the daytime market was shrinking. It was not that he couldn’t compete with sensationalism. “It is a medium that rewards reputation and I don’t need to be a lifeless hero,” he mentioned, and he was not above showing in drag on his present to analyze the expertise. However he was shedding a lot of the ladies’s viewers to Oprah’s personal model of audience-bonding positivity. Donahue’s present lastly resulted in 1996.
He got here again in July 2002 on the cable and satellite tv for pc information channel MSNBC. Though he was the channel’s top-rated present, he couldn’t compete with Fox Information, and he had one other downside: he was one of many few distinguished information folks against the Iraq warfare. An inner memo revealed that Donahue was thought-about a “troublesome public face for NBC in a time of warfare”. Donahue claimed NBC (whose dad or mum firm, Normal Electrical, was a number one warfare contractor) “required now we have two conservative visitors for each liberal, and I used to be counted as two liberals”.
In 2007, he co-directed a documentary movie, Physique of Struggle, with Ellen Spiro, which detailed the painful readjustment to lifetime of a serviceman disabled within the Iraq warfare. Donahue was a frequent visitor throughout the total spectrum of stories and discuss programmes, together with some on Fox. He was additionally a part of a 2013 documentary, Discovering Vivian Maier, concerning the road photographer and nanny whose work was found posthumously; she had been a babysitter for Donahue’s kids.
In Could 2024 Donahue was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Joe Biden. He’s survived by Marlo and three sons, Michael, Kevin and Daniel, and a daughter, Mary Rose, from his first marriage. One other son, James, died in 2014.
