Pioneer talk show host Phil Donahue dies at 88 : NPR

Phil Donahue united a broadcaster’s telegenic attraction, an insistent curiosity, and a style for provocative matters to create a brand new style of tv – the viewers participation speak present – which briefly took over daytime tv and sealed his standing as a TV pioneer. The broadcaster, who was age 88, died on Sunday, his household stated.

No reason for demise was given, although his household stated he’d “handed away peacefully following a protracted sickness.”
 
However though he constructed his legend on cheeky stunts, Donahue typically led earnest conversations on newsy matters. From interviewing former Ku Klux Klan chief David Duke in 1991 as he was working for governor of Louisiana to jousting with conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Donahue dug into hot-button points with the zeal of an investigative journalist – emulating the type of mainstream media figures who all the time impressed him.
 
“I grew up on this recreation with stars in my eyes,” Donahue stated in an interview with NPR in 2021. “I all the time admired mainstream media varieties. They went proper for the jugular. It appeared to me they didn’t must be in style. They only needed to be aggressive and have their info straight.”
 
Donahue sat his visitors earlier than a big studio viewers, stalking by way of the group with a microphone, mixing questions from the onlookers together with his personal queries and – for a time – questions from callers over the phone.
 
The previous radio announcer lobbed questions with a down-to-earth attraction and a aptitude for dramatic pauses so distinctive that impressionist Darrell Hammond captured it on Saturday Night time Dwell. One other SNL alum, Phil Hartman, truly lampooned him to his face in 1989.

One among Donahue’s improvements was that he spoke to a predominantly feminine TV viewers with out speaking right down to them, highlighting a single subject per present: atheism, abortion, racism.

The host himself stated controversy was the important thing to his present’s survival. “The coin of our realm is the scale of the viewers,” Donahue stated in a 2016 interview with the New York Public Media present MetroFocus. “What is going to draw a crowd, particularly to a visually boring program? And we thought: Controversy. Controversy is what’s going to do it.”

Born Philip John Donahue in Cleveland, Ohio, he graduated from the College of Notre Dame and labored for a radio station in a small city in Michigan. “I might cease the Mayor of Adrian, Michigan within the hallway,” he informed NPR in 2021. “I used to be, like 21 – I’ll have appeared 16 – and it was type of a first-grade lesson within the energy of journalism.”

In 1967, Donahue moved a radio speak present he was internet hosting in Dayton, Ohio to native TV, and The Phil Donahue Present was born. His first visitor was famend atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair – who had introduced a lawsuit in opposition to prayer in colleges — and some years later, his present was syndicated nationally, kicking off a 26-year run in daytime tv, largely with little competitors.

His mixture of hot-button matters with earnest dialogue was so profitable that it was finally emulated by everybody from Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, and Morton Downey Jr. to Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey stated as a lot whereas handing Donahue a Lifetime Achievement Award on the Daytime Emmy Awards in 1996, noting, “Had there not been a Phil Donahue, I don’t suppose there might have been an Oprah.”

Donahue, talking with the Archive of American Tv, stated he was all the time stunned nobody got here alongside to actually attempt copying what he did till Winfrey’s debut in 1986. “Alongside comes Oprah Winfrey, and it’s not attainable to overstate the enormity of her impression on the daytime tv recreation,” he stated. “In some ways, she raised all of the boats along with her success. If you happen to didn’t have Oprah, you needed to have me. And we had been loads cheaper.”

Winfrey’s success led many different hosts to attempt the format, with some that includes more and more combative and tawdry topics, together with fistfights onstage. As soon as thought-about outrageous himself, Donahue discovered his present overwhelmed in rankings by extra specific packages and retired from daytime TV in 1996 after greater than 6,000 reveals.

He wouldn’t return to an everyday TV job till 2002 when he hosted a present for MSNBC known as Donahue. He tried emulating the fearless truth-telling he all the time idolized in mainstream journalism, however Donahue lasted lower than a 12 months there. He didn’t maintain again when telling NPR why it was canceled.

“I used to be fired as a result of I didn’t assist the invasion of Iraq,” he added. “I believed I used to be going to be a success as a result of I used to be completely different. Everyone else was beating the conflict drums. I wished to get on the air and say, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Donahue stated the firing primarily ended his TV profession. He did co-direct a 2007 documentary Physique of Warfare and co-wrote a e-book in 2020 known as What Makes a Marriage Final with spouse and actress Marlo Thomas.

He married Thomas – a TV star, producer and outspoken feminist — in 1980 after assembly her when she was a visitor on his present.