Phil Donahue

Phil Donahue

Phillip John Donahue (born December 21, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American media personality, best known as the the creator and star of The Phil Donahue Show, also known as Donahue, the first tabloid talk show. The Phil Donahue show had a 27-year run on national (U.S.) TV, plus two years of local broadcast in Dayton, Ohio before ending in 1996.

His shows have generally focused on issues that often divide liberals and conservatives in the U.S., such as abortion, consumer protection (his most frequent guest was Ralph Nader, for whom he campaigned in 2000), civil rights and war protests.

Donahue later hosted a show on MSNBC (2002–2003) which was cancelled by corporate executives, in what observers saw was due to the nationalist political climate in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks and during the early years of the Iraq War.

Personal history

In 1953, Donahue was a member of the first graduating class of St. Edward High School, an all-boys college prep Catholic high school run by the Brothers of Holy Cross in suburban Lakewood, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.B.A. in 1957. A year later he married his first wife, Marge Cooney, who divorced him in 1975. There were five children from that marriage. He married his second (and present) wife, actress Marlo Thomas, in 1980.

Early career

Donahue began his career in 1957 as a production assistant at KYW radio and television in Cleveland. He got a chance to become an announcer one day when the regular announcer failed to show up. After a brief stint as a bank check sorter in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he became program director for WABJ radio in Adrian, Michigan, soon after graduating. He moved on to become a stringer for the CBS Evening News and later, an anchor of the morning newscast at WHIO-TV in Dayton, Ohio, where his interviews with Jimmy Hoffa and Billie Sol Estes were picked up nationally. While in Dayton, Donahue also hosted Conversation Piece, a phone-in talk show from 1963–1967 on WHIO radio. There, he interviewed civil rights activists (including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X) and war dissenters.

The Phil Donahue Show / Donahue (1967-1996)

In 1967, Donahue left the WHIO stations and moved his talk program to television with The Phil Donahue Show on WLWD (now WDTN), also in Dayton. Initially, the program was shown only on other stations owned by the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation (which would later take the name of its parent Avco Company), which also owned WLWD. But, in 1970, The Phil Donahue Show entered nationwide syndication.

Donahue relocated the show's home base to Chicago in 1974, first housing it at independent station WGN-TV. Around this time the show's popularity increased, and in the process it became both a national phenomenon. When the Avco Company divested their broadcasting properties in 1976, Multimedia Inc., assumed production and syndication of the program, which was now known as simply Donahue. In 1982, Donahue moved the show to CBS-owned WBBM-TV for its final years based in Chicago and the Midwest.

In 1984, Donahue introduced many viewers to hip-hop culture for the first time, as a program featured breakdancing for the first time on national television, accompanied by a performance from the rap group UTFO.

In 1985, Donahue moved the program's operations to New York City, housing them in NBC's Rockefeller Plaza building. Prior to the move, NBC's late-night talk host David Letterman would use portions of his national program counting down the days to Donahue's move with a huge calendar in his studio.

One of the most talked-about incidents in Donahue's history came on January 21, 1985, soon after the show moved to New York. On this day's program, seven members of the audience appeared to faint during the broadcast, which was seen live in New York. Donahue, fearing the fainting was caused by both anxiety at being on television and an overheated studio, eventually cleared the studio of audience members and then resumed the show. It turned out the fainting "spell" was cooked up by media hoaxer Alan Abel in what Abel said was a protest against what he termed as poor-quality television.

In 1992, Donahue celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his local and national program with a special produced at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, in which he was lauded by his talk-show peers. Ironically, in many corners, he was seen as having been bypassed both by Oprah Winfrey, whose own hugely successful national show was based in Donahue's former Chicago home base; and Sally Jessy Raphael, whose own talk show was distributed by Donahue's syndicator, Multimedia.

As the 1990s progressed, ratings steadily declined, leading one station, KGO-TV in San Francisco, to drop the program at the start of the 1995-96 season. Weeks later, New York's WNBC-TV, whose studios housed the program, also cancelled it. Donahue was also evicted from its Rockefeller Plaza home, and relocated to new studios in Manhattan. The program did not relocate to another station in either New York or San Francisco, two of the largest television markets. Donahue ended the series after 29 years, 26 of them in syndication. The final original episode of Donahue aired in May 1996, culminating what remains the longest continuous run of any syndicated talk show in U.S. television history.

As a result of several acquisitions and mergers since 1996, the Donahue show catalog is now the property of NBC Universal Television.

Donahue on MSNBC

Phil Donahue
Starring	Phil Donahue
Country of origin	United States
Production
Running time	60 minutes
Original release
Network	MSNBC
Release	July 15, 2002 – February 25, 2003

In 2002, Phil Donahue returned to television to host a show called Donahue on MSNBC. Its debut ratings were strong, but its audience evaporated over the following months. In late August 2002, it got one of the lowest possible Nielsen ratings (0.1), less than MSNBC's average for the day of 0.2. On February 25, 2003, MSNBC cancelled the show, citing low viewership. However, that month, Donahue averaged 446,000 viewers and became the highest rated show on the network. Other MSNBC shows, including Hardball with Chris Matthews and Scarborough Country, averaged lower ratings in 2005. Later, the media watchdog group FAIR received a copy of an internal NBC memo that mentioned that Donahue had to be fired because he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war". Donahue was a vocal critic of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He mentioned the internal memo later in an interview on WILL-AM, a public radio station. Keith Olbermann, arguably the network's most prominent commentator since Donahue, told TV Guide in 2007 that the cancellation had as much to do with the show's production cost as it did with political orientation.

Interview with Bill O'Reilly (9/05)

In September 2005 Donahue was briefly back in public attention after an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor in which he rebuked Bill O'Reilly for his criticism of Cindy Sheehan and his support for the Iraq War.

Donahue also said that O'Reilly based his show and his interviewing style on little more than loudness and talking points, and criticized his treatment of Jeremy Glick, the son of a September 11 terror attack victim (Barry Glick) who appeared on the show.

External links

• Museum of Broadcast Communications: Donahue, Phil

• Democracy Now!: Interview with Phil Donahue on the state of the media

• Archive of American Television : Video Interview