Before there was Jerry Springer there was Phil Donahue. Donahue, who has died aged 88, took the talkshow format into the audience, a tactic that paved the way for a small herd of daytime programmes. As Oprah Winfrey said in 2018: “If it weren’t for Phil Donahue, there would never have been an Oprah Show.”
Oprah’s acknowledgment reflected Donahue’s hold over daytime television’s primary audience: women. His programmes often addressed serious and even controversial topics, presented with moderation and without rancour, mixed with often salacious discussions of sex and relationships, the attention-grabbing stuff that became the ubiquitous fodder for a relentless drive to the bottom of the marketplace for hosts Donahue called “my illegitimate children” – Jenny Jones, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Montel Williams or Ricki Lake.
But Donahue avoided pandering to housewives; he took his core audience seriously. “There is sexism and paternalism among [those] who decide what gets in,” he said in 1979. “The men who run television still grossly underestimate the American woman.” At his peak, Donahue could claim his show, syndicated to more than 200 stations, attracted close to 9 million viewers, including as much as 90% of female watchers.
Donahue’s formula, like his career, involved some serendipity. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father, Philip, was a furniture salesman and his mother, Catharine (nee McClory), sold shoes in a department store. He attended St Edward, a Catholic boys’ high school in suburban Lakewood. At the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, he broadcast on the campus radio station, WNDU and worked summers as an assistant at KYW in Cleveland.
After graduating with a degree in business administration, he married his college sweetheart, Marge Cooney, in 1958, and worked for a short time in a bank in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. But he wanted to be a broadcaster, and he took a job as programme director with WABJ in Adrian, Michigan. This led to a job as the morning news anchor on WHIO in Dayton, Ohio, where he scored significant phone interviews with controversial figures such as the Teamsters’ union head Jimmy Hoffa and Billie Sol Estes, the key figure in Texas corruption scandals involving Lyndon Johnson. In 1963 Donahue hosted an afternoon talkshow, Conversation Piece, which lasted four years.
However, he felt frustrated, and briefly quit to work as a salesman for a Green Shield-style trading stamp company. But within months the Phil Donahue Show debuted on Dayton’s WLWD-TV, owned by Cincinnati’s Crosley’s Broadcasting.
Donahue quickly understood the limitations of the TV studio. A phone interview with a radio station was one thing, but getting big-name subjects to travel to Dayton was another. So he limited his shows to just one guest, one topic, and invited questions from the audience. His very first guest was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a prominent atheist whose case against compulsory prayer in public (ie state) schools, led to a supreme court ruling confirming separation of church and state. He realised that the subject, deemed controversial, drew a huge response because of its importance to his audience, whom he perceived as often asking questions more probing than his own.
Donahue’s impact was immediate. Crosley began syndicating the show to their 44 stations in the midwest, and it began to be picked up nationwide. In 1974, retitled simply Donahue, it moved to the studios of WGN in Chicago, and in 1976 was bought by Multimedia, who moved it to New York in 1985. Alongside his own show’s success, in the 80s Donahue appeared in regular segments of NBC’s Network breakfast show, Today, and later on ABC’s late night The Last Word.
His first marriage ended in divorce in 1975. In 1977, he interviewed Marlo Thomas, the star of That Girl, a popular comedy, and creator of the bestselling record and book Free To Be … You And Me, which promoted gender-neutrality. They married in 1980. Donahue was one of the first broadcasters to address the Aids pandemic, in a 1982 symposium that featured the screenwriter Larry Kramer. Overall, he won 10 Daytime Emmy awards, including a lifetime achievement award, as best host, and a Primetime Emmy for his 1981 special Donahue and Kids, including survivors of life-threatening illnesses. And he took part in a programme called the US-Soviet Space Bridge, which featured live studio hook-ups of his show in America with one hosted by Vladimir Pozner in Russia. It became a regular show, Pozner/Donahue, syndicated from 1991 to 1994.
By that time, however, Donahue’s share of the daytime market was shrinking. It was not that he could not compete with sensationalism. “This is a medium that rewards popularity and I don’t want to be a dead hero,” he said, and he was not above appearing in drag on his show to investigate the experience. But he was losing much of the women’s audience to Oprah’s own brand of audience-bonding positivity. Donahue’s show finally ended in 1996.
He came back in July 2002 on the cable and satellite news channel MSNBC. Although he was the channel’s top-rated show, he could not compete with Fox News, and he had another problem: he was one of the few prominent news people opposed to the Iraq war. An internal memo revealed that Donahue was considered a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war”. Donahue claimed NBC (whose parent company, General Electric, was a leading war contractor) “required we have two conservative guests for every liberal, and I was counted as two liberals”.
In 2007, he co-directed a documentary film, Body of War, with Ellen Spiro, which detailed the painful readjustment to life of a serviceman disabled in the Iraq war. Donahue was a frequent guest across the full spectrum of news and talk programmes, including some on Fox. He was also part of a 2013 documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, about the street photographer and nanny whose work was discovered posthumously; she had been a babysitter for Donahue’s children.
In May 2024 Donahue was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Joe Biden. He is survived by Marlo and three sons, Michael, Kevin and Daniel, and a daughter, Mary Rose, from his first marriage. Another son, James, died in 2014.
• Phil (Philip) Donahue, talkshow host, born 21 December 1935; died 18 August 2024
