In an age before social media, texting, and even email, talk show viewers who had something to say had two ways of expressing themselves: They could place a call to a call-in show, such as Larry King Live, or they could park themselves in the studio audience of The Phil Donahue Show.
Phil Donahue, who died on Aug. 18 at the age of 88, was not only the most expressively inquisitive of daytime TV talk show hosts but surely the most athletic: In his prime years in national syndication, Donahue would clamber up and down steps and reach past rows of guests with the sole purpose of placing a microphone, which often seemed to be an extension of his hand, before an audience member who had a question or a comment.
Let us not get too sentimental about the show or its host. The Phil Donahue Show — a title later abbreviated, in recognition of its namesake’s star power, to Donahue — had many of the same faults as present-day news, opinion, and talk shows, including an obvious liberal bent and a tendency to sensationalize and simplify their subjects. All the same, Donahue, more than any other daytime talk show host of his era, genuinely savored what regular folks might have to say, or ask, on any given day.
“I realized during the commercials that these people in the audience were asking better questions than I was,” Donahue recalled about his program’s early days in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “There would have been no Donahue show without that studio audience. We put the cameras behind the audience and moved the audience up close — first time that had ever been done. Audiences had generally been regarded as nuisances by local television stations.”
Despite his success on the national scene, Donahue stands out from many contemporary media personalities for presenting himself as the product of a specific place. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Donahue came across as something like a nosey, opinionated, free-thinking, no-guff Midwesterner. Up to the end, he retained a flat Midwestern accent that would be familiar to anyone from the region. He also carried with him the Catholicism in which he had been reared and educated. A product of the Catholic school system, he entered the University of Notre Dame, from which he received a degree in 1957.
These days, aspiring news personalities most often make a beeline to New York or Washington, but Donahue made the Midwest his base of operations during his long road to success and for quite a while thereafter. His early resume included radio and television gigs in Ohio and adjacent states. Finally, he wound up in Dayton. Known as the Birthplace of Aviation for having produced the Wright brothers, the city was also the initial point of origin for The Phil Donahue Show, which premiered in 1967 on WLWD-TV.
As Donahue remembered, he was tapped to take over a show that was already being produced with a studio audience, but it wasn’t exactly a serious or spirited discussion of the issues of the day. “I followed a show that was piano, song … you sat in the audience, you hold up a sign, and you say hello to your kids,” Donahue told the Archive of American Television. He retained the live bodies in the audience but quickly reworked the content. “The first show was atheists: Madalyn Murray O’Hair,” he said. “Can you imagine? Dayton, Ohio, 10:30 in the morning, turn on the television, and there’s this Donahue guy with the most hated woman in America.”
Therein lies an irony: Despite having the appearance and bearing of a square Clevelander, Donahue was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who was addicted to such attention-grabbing, then-outré subjects. His show dove headlong into topics such as AIDS, the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, and gay marriage. This was part of his brand but also part of his own surprisingly countercultural makeup: He became so widely identified with feminism and women’s issues that when Phil Hartman parodied the host on Saturday Night Live, the comedian opened his emphatic, and hilariously accurate, impression this way: “Women are exploited in relationships! Because there are a lot of men out there who lie to them, who cheat on them, who live off them!”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
When interviewing Donahue and his wife, actress Marlo Thomas, in 2020, CBS News Sunday Morning host Jane Pauley meant to praise him, but in fact damned him with faint praise, when she called him “a woke man”: “You were a feminist, at least your reputation. You were a daytime host who got it about women!” Beaming with pride, Donahue replied: “Well, I had Gloria Steinem on my program very early, and all the feminists somehow seemed to sooner or later show up on the Donahue show.”
At his best, Donahue’s intellectual curiosity trumped his undeniable biases. Yes, he invited Ralph Nader on too often, but to his credit, he wasn’t afraid to bring on Ayn Rand and Camille Paglia, either. And in Donahue’s last major rendezvous with the viewing public, his ideological instincts proved sound: In 2002, about six years after the original Donahue concluded its run, MSNBC ushered him back on the air with a new show, but it met a quick end reportedly because of its host’s lonely opposition to the Iraq War.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.