Pioneering talk show host was 88

Successful national talk show host Phil Donahue, who entertained, challenged and informed two generations of daytime television viewers, died Sunday evening after a long illness. family told “Today.” He was 88.

The groundbreaking, issues-oriented “The Phil Donahue Show” was picked up for national syndication in 1969, renamed “Donahue” in 1974 and eventually reached more than 200 stations nationwide. It wasn’t until 1996, when the daytime talk show landscape had radically transformed into a gossip circus and competitors, including Oprah Winfrey, had drained away its female viewers. Although Donahue was not afraid to resort to sensational topics, his show was still quite tame compared to the imitators like “Sally Jesse Raphael” and “Jerry Springer” that followed.

The silver-haired Donahue was never a stranger to controversy or hotly debated socio-political issues. He provided a strong journalistic backbone to his popular show, providing a powerful contrast to the mainstream celebrity talk and soap operas on daytime television.

In total, Donahue received nine Daytime Emmys and 21 nominations, as well as a primetime Emmy for his special “Donahue and Kids.” (Other nightly specials included the five-part “Phil Donahue Examines the Human Animal,” first broadcast in 1986.) Donahue received a Peabody Award in 1981.

Donahue’s non-threatening, fatherly image was key to his appeal, as was his bond with the women in his studio audience. Another factor was his probing interview style, which was forceful without being combative. Over the years he interviewed heads of state, politicians, feminists, members of the Ku Klux Klan, porn stars and radicals from the 1960s. He was the only talk show host who spoke to Nelson Mandela from South Africa immediately after his release from prison. His show was so controversial that Newsweek once wrote, “One sometimes suspects that Donahue’s idea of ​​the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who have had a child through artificial insemination.” And in fact, one such couple appeared on the show in 1979.

On his way to becoming a cultural touchstone of his time, Donahue also became wealthy: according to VarietyIn the mid-1990s, he earned $20 million a year in salary, multimedia stock and other options.

Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland, Ohio on December 21, 1935. After his freshman year at Notre Dame, where he majored in business administration, Donahue took a summer job at WNDU, the university’s local station, and worked his way up to announcer. After graduating with a BBA, he started as a summer substitute announcer for KYW-AM TV, a television and radio outlet in Cleveland, and left only to return soon after, unhappy with his job and unable to break in in full-time TV journalism.

In 1958 he went to work for WABJ, a small radio station in Michigan, as program/news director, which led to a job at WHIO-AM-TV in Dayton, where he honed his reporting skills and landed interviews with the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and Billie Sol Estes. He also hosted a daily 90-minute radio talk show in 1963 called “Conversation Piece”, which attracted a largely female audience. But he became frustrated in his attempts to land a job with national reach and quit broadcasting in 1967 to work as a salesman for EF MacDonald, a stamp company in Dayton.

Within months, however, he was back hosting a morning interview program on WLWD TV in Dayton, “The Phil Donahue Show.” Unable to attract prominent personalities to town, Donahue used the disadvantage to his advantage: he interviewed only one person and addressed only one issue per show and, most importantly, he interacted extensively with the studio audience. His frequent visits to the audience and encouragement of participation would soon become the show’s trademark.

His first guest was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist whose case against school prayer had been successfully argued before the Supreme Court; the show attracted a lot of response from the viewers. Soon, Donahue was addressing controversial topics such as premarital sex and homosexuality, as well as other social, political, and lifestyle issues. He later attended the Ohio State Penitentiary and the Ohio Reformatory for Women and spent time immersing himself in prison life. He brought in the president of General Motors to debate consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

The show was such a success in Dayton that Avco Broadcasting Co. it began syndicating to other stations in the country in 1969. Two years later, the show was popular on 44 stations, mostly in the Midwest. The show moved to the WGN-TV station facilities in Chicago and was renamed “Donahue” in 1974.

Multimedia program Prod. purchased “Donahue” in 1976, and by the late 1970s it was airing on more than 200 stations, mostly network affiliates, reaching 9 million viewers, the vast majority of whom were women. By then he was receiving $500,000 a year and a percentage of the show’s revenue. As Donahue’s popularity increased, his annual salary would rise above $1 million, and he even signed to appear regularly on “The Today Show” from 1979-82 and on ABC’s late-night “The Last Word” for a years after that. .

In 1985 the show moved to New York and aired live (until then the show was only live in Chicago and most other places). The same year, Donahue and Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pozner initiated dialogues between American and Russian audiences in Leningrad via satellite, and he later traveled to the Soviet Union as the first American talk show host to be taped in the communist country and the first western journalist who came to visit. Chernobyl after the nuclear accident. The news/talk show “Pozner/Donahue,” co-hosted by the pair, ran in syndication on CNBC from 1991 to 1994. During the 1992 primary season, he hosted a debate between future President Bill Clinton and one of his opponents, former California Governor Jerry Brown.

In the mid-1990s, with more than 6,000 shows airing, Donahue became a victim of his own success. Other talk shows, equally or more salacious, proliferated, and to compete, Donahue had to continually raise (or lower) the bar. His main rival Oprah Winfrey diluted his female base. Other shows, seeking to appeal to younger viewers, went even further in pursuing sensational topics. Slowly he started losing major markets until he and Multimedia called it quits in 1996.

In 2002–2003, Donahue briefly returned to television with a self-titled MSNBC talk show in which he interviewed newsmakers about social and political issues. Its audience was dwarfed by that of Fox Network’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” which it competed with but had the highest ratings of any program on the cable network at the time. Nevertheless, MSNBC canceled “Donahue” after six months, leading some observers to conclude that the network did not welcome the show given the political climate in the country at the time.

“Network management apparently did not care about the anchor’s left-wing politics, a claim that echoes a recently leaked internal memo that found Donahue’s politics would not have been palatable to hear.[ience]in time of war,” Variety said at the time.

Oprah Winfrey praised Donahue in a September 2002 interview when she was considering running an anti-war series on her own show, saying, “The bottom line is, we need you, Phil, because we need to be challenged by the voice of dissent opinions.”

With Ellen Spiro, Donahue wrote, directed and produced the 2007 documentary “Body of War,” an indictment of the Iraq war that followed a single soldier wounded after returning from combat. Variety called it “a powerful argument against impetuous decisions, whether to join the military or to attack a country.”

Donahue continued to have a presence on television even after not having his own show, appearing on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’, ‘Tavis Smiley’, ‘Real Time With Bill Maher’, ‘Hannity’, ‘The Piers Morgan Show’ and “ Moyers & Company.” In November 2010, Donahue appeared on an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” along with former talk show hosts Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake and Montel Williams.

He also appeared in documentaries, including “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe” (2009); ‘Good Riddance’ from 2011, about Madalyn Murray O’Hair; “Finding Vivian Maier” from 2013; and, along with many other notable people, in 2014’s ‘Unity’.

Donahue was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 1993 and won an ATAS Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.

Survivors include Donahue’s second wife, Marlo Thomas, whom he married in 1980; and five children from his first marriage.