My mother cried when I told her that Phil Donahue died. Her mother (my grandmother) was an avid viewer of his daytime talk show, and my mom also considered the conversations that he hosted essential viewing. In the 1990s, my mother and her best friend attended a Donahue taping in Chicago. My mom was fond of recalling for friends and family how the host “winked at her.” “He did so much for two generations of women,” my mother said through her tears, explaining that his program took women seriously as an audience, offering them not cooking tips and fashion advice, but substantive discussions on politics, race, gender, psychology, and the arts. “He gave women a voice and he evolved with them,” she added.
Phil Donahue died at the age of 88 after suffering from what his family called a “long illness.” According to the announcement, he was surrounded by his wife of 44 years, actress and feminist icon Marlo Thomas, his children, grandchildren and “beloved golden retriever.” There are many women who will mourn Donahue. He first began hosting a talk show in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio in 1967, eventually moved to Chicago, and then New York, winning 20 Emmy Awards and a Peabody before going off the air in 1996.
With an audience of predominantly women on the airwaves and in the studio, he cultivated an aggressive and flashy style – interrogating guests on a variety of subjects, never shirking from controversy. His first guest after going national was Madlyn Murray O’Hair, who was the founder of American Atheists, and years before it became international scandal, he featured guests who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. When marriage equality was only an LGBT activist dream, he televised a same-sex wedding ceremony, and he also lost advertisements over broadcasting an abortion. In 1992, he hosted a Democratic primary debate between Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown. The guests who made the most recurring appearances were Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem, but he also gave the daytime spotlight to radical intellectuals, like Noam Chomsky, who typically had trouble booking segments on mainstream television.
By no fault of Donahue’s, he rarely receives the credit he deserves for broadening public discourse. The genre that he helped create would descend into the cultural sewer shortly after he left the airwaves. Maury Povich conducted more paternity tests than a medical laboratory, and Jerry Springer went from serving one year as mayor of Cinicinnati to hosting a program full of brawls, mean-spirited mockery of the poor, disabled and transgender – with hollering audiences blissfully unaware that their behavior typified what would become known as “trash TV.”
Reflecting on Donahue’s 29-year run, it is difficult to believe that he managed to survive in a culture rushing for advertisement revenue and appealing to a common denominator so low that it makes pro wrestling look like a night at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. It has become routine to lament how political partisans cannot break out of their “media silos,” creating an “epistemic crisis” in which voters exclusively receive information that reinforces their biases. Donahue sat across the table from David Duke and Louis Farrakhan; Phyllis Schlafly and Andrea Dworkin; Ayn Rand and Angela Davis.
His best qualities were those that are critical for a well-functioning democracy: open-mindedness and curiosity. It was due to those qualities that, as he phrases it in his excellent memoir, “My Own Story,” he “stumbled into success.”
He explained that it was due to the intelligence of the women in his audience and their zeal to amplify their experiences and analysis, that he attempted to elevate the ambition of the talk show. He transformed it from a superficial variety hour to a forum of thoughtful, incisive and robust debate surrounding the most important issues in the news and most intimate topics of a person’s life.
Describing the kind of woman he met on a regular basis in his audience, he wrote, “She is millions of American women who grew up with their legs crossed and their minds closed by a culture that featured loud, intimidating men and silent, obedient women, who wash and can and sew and pray . . . When she dies, she will leave a society that had more than 60 years (sometimes a lot more) to take advantage of her talent and failed to do so.”
Phil Donahue argued that the relegation of women to roles of docility was a crime in itself, but that it also was “killing our society, because we are failing to realize the potential contributions of at least half of the people who live in it.”
In a chapter that amounts to feminist manifesto, Donahue praises the daughters and granddaughters of the women who suffered in silence under the cult of domesticity – the young women who would engineer the “most dramatic shift in mores that has befallen women in history.”
With a woman seeking the presidency of the United States, women occupying gubernatorial and mayoral seats across the country, from New York to Arizona, and from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, and with women rising in all of the professions, we are living in the world that Donahue predicted, and we are accruing the benefits of the women’s liberation movement.
Donahue’s important, mass media contribution to that movement was almost accidental. He spent his formative years in a conservative, Catholic household, and as a student at Notre Dame University, he harbored the political and theological assumptions of his upbringing. As he explains with honesty and verve in his memoir, it was only through the work of journalism – meeting and interviewing people of wildly different beliefs and backgrounds, learning stories unlike any those he would hear in the dormitories of Notre Dame – that he began his long transformation into a proud liberal, outspoken feminist and freethinking agnostic.
One of his conversion stories involved him sitting on the board of a civil rights organization in Chicago. When Black board members began a discussion on where they should acquire furniture for a youth center, Donahue suggested Goodwill. “We give to Goodwill,” one Black woman shot back to a humiliated Donahue. He was not afraid to look foolish as he learned, and as he learned, he taught his audience.
The arc of Donahue is the opposite of a radicalization story. It is the chronicle of how an open mind acts as natural light for personal growth and fertilizer for social movements.
American television audiences not only evolved because of the insight that Donahue’s program provided, but he evolved with them.
His return to television, as a primetime political talk show host for MSNBC in 2002, acts as an allegory against how the corporate conquest of media demolished the open forums of the variety that Donahue excelled at creating.
At the height of pro-war hysteria following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 – while the Bush administration, with an often supine Democratic Party, violated civil liberties in the name of public safety – Donahue shoved the propagandists for war and expanding national security state against the wall. He also interviewed opponents of the Iraq War.
"Donahue" was the highest rated on MSNBC. Then, he was fired. Given his success, prestige, and ability to attract A-list guests, his abrupt termination in 2003 was, initially, a source of bewilderment. Then, an internal MSNBC memo leaked to a media criticism website. The memo warned of the risks facing the network if, because of Donahue, it “became home of the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag.”
Over the course of Donahue’s career, as he became more willing to explore opposing ideas and the full breadth of the American experience, the television media turned more restrictive, narrow, profit-obsessed and cowardly. His daytime success and primetime failure illustrates the American media’s metamorphosis – a metamorphosis that inflicts immeasurable damage on public debate, and the democracy that it is supposed to enhance.
Following his departure from MSNBC, Phil Donahue co-directed a documentary with Ellen Spiro, "Body of War." It documents the catastrophe of combat as visited upon Tomas Young, an Army Veteran who after taking gunfire in Iraq, lost the use of his body from the chest down. The title doubles as a description of Young’s paralysis and the Congressional chambers that voted to authorize President George W. Bush’s use of “pre-emptive force” against Saddam Hussein.
While cable news was “waving the flag,” Donahue and Spiro offered a profound and tragic illustration of the life-and-death consequences of crude nationalism.
Those who use their hands to salute the flag immediately after tying blindfolds around their eyes violate the values that they claim to uphold. The story that Donahue was most fond of telling from American history on his own program, in his book, and in interviews captured the essence of genuine patriotism. As he explained to Oprah Winfrey:
One of the Supreme Court stories I love is about Jehovah's Witness kids who wouldn't salute the flag in the 1940s. It was against their religion because they pay homage to no one except God. So there were schoolchildren in a classroom who wouldn't pledge. People threw stones at these kids and even burned down a Kingdom Hall in Kennebunk, Maine. The Supreme Court said they had to salute the flag. Three years later, the Court reversed itself — but in those three years, thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses were brutally beaten. In the final Supreme Court decision, Justice Robert Jackson said, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion . . ." Majority ruled. Then nine old guys looked down over that mahogany bench and said to those Jehovah's Witness children: You obey your parents. That makes me a proud American.
Anyone who watched even a few minutes of a Donahue show remembers that he had a storytelling style of charm and drama. He used the tactics of a thespian – wild gesticulations, theatrical shifts in cadence – to animate into life the stakes of his subject matter. Even a textual reproduction of the Jehovah’s Witness story demonstrates why it was a permanent part of his historical canon. It is a juggernaut advancement of the strength that welcomes vulnerability, love of country that encourages dissent and pride that accepts the possibility of weakness.
These were also the values of Phil Donahue’s journalism, liberalism and feminism. In “My Own Story,” his admission of insecurity is a declaration of solidity in disguise: “Imagine how threatening it is to a former altar boy finding himself, 30 years later, in the company of women who are not only smart but eager for power."
Even as he felt threatened, he asked interesting questions and listened to unforgiving answers. The Donahue show has ended, but the inquiry continues.
