“The Father of Day Talk Television” passed away Sunday, August 18th at 88 years old, surrounded by his wife of 44 years, actress Marlo Thomas, and “his children, his grandchildren, and his beloved golden retriever, Charlie,” his family said in a statement.
Phil Donahue was born in Cleveland, Ohio to a middle-class Catholic family. He attended an all-boys college preparatory Catholic school and later the University of Notre Dame. He became a “Stringer” or freelance journalist for CBS Evening News in Dayton Ohio, where he interviewed Jimmy Hoffa and Muhammad Ali.
The Phil Donahue Show began on November 6, 1967, in Dayton Ohio, on WDTN. His first guest was the founder of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O’Hair. He later described O’Hair as being very unpleasant behind the camera.
“Trailblazer is overused.” My father, a long-time fan, expressed. “But he was a Trailblazer, he was fearless.”
The Phil Donahue Show introduced a revolutionary concept of audience participation. Instead of the usual “guy behind the desk” format, Donahue often scrambled across the crowd, trudging up and down the stairs of his studio, pitching his microphone to just about anyone—a format used by The Oprah Winfrey Show years later.
His topics were heavily debated and often controversial. He gave some Americans their first real exposure to issues like sexual harassment and abuse, gay marriage, abortion, and AIDS. Donahue’s contentious guest list included Nelson Mandela, Donald Trump, Noam Chomsky, and Ronald Regan.
In 1986, Donahue introduced a “space bridge” telecast between America and the Soviet Union. Donahue was set to bring his show to Russia for a week: to cover the recent Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Donahue was the first Western journalist to visit Chernobyl after the accident.
The Donahue show concluded in 1996 on WNBC-TV; Donahue was retired for 7 years, when he returned to MSNBC in 2002, hosting the daytime slot.
Only 6 months later, Donahue was abruptly fired from MSNBC as his show got further down the primetime slots. Donahue only averaged 446,000 views while his biggest competition averaged over a million.
However, the problem wasn’t ratings, but the people Donahue began to allow on his show, anti-Iraq war voices at the time when the invasion was incredibly popular with the American public.
An internal MSNBC memo worried Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.”
“They were terrified of the antiwar voice,” Donahue commented in 2013 during an interview with Democracy Now.
Donahue later directed a documentary called “Body of War” in 2007 along with filmmaker Ellen Spiro. The film is about an Iraq War veteran Tomas Young who was wounded and paralyzed by a bullet to the spine.
Donahue won nine Daytime Emmys for his talk shows and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1996. In 2024, he received the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
