When Phil Donahue called a halt to his show the other week after nearly 29 years, he was almost universally lauded as the elder statesman of television talk. The man who pioneered the confessional talk-show almost three decades ago — where guests willingly exhibited every imaginable emotion and behavior, except a sense of shame, and the only sin was being judgmental — could not keep up with the indignities his younger competitors had imposed on the form. Donahue had, according to the Associated Press, “struggled” to take the “high road” even as other talk shows grew increasingly sleazy. Thus did a man who once did a show in drag find himself strangely recast as a force for good, a wholesome influence on a corrupt medium.
The idea is, in truth, absurd. Donahue is the program that inaugurated television’s daytime parade of the tawdry, freakish, and bizarre. The idea that television viewers found his recent shows about “open season on husbands” private parts” and “a couple looking for a third mate” too bland and therefore defected to racier programs like Ricki Lake or Charles Perez is comical. What happened, in brief, is that he lost his New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles outlets at the very same time that the confessional talk-show form began to die. A massive shakeout in the daytime talk-show game may mean that by the end of 1996, only Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, Montel Williams, and Jenny Jones will be left. This may seem like an inordinate number of programs, but in the past few years there have been almost two dozen others: Gabrielle, Charles, Mark, Carnie, Bertice, Leeza, Rolonda, Les, Dennis, Tempestt, Maury, Lauren, Jane, Jane (yes, two Janes), and other first names too tiresome to recall.
Donahue’s friends are not shedding tears over his departure because he showed more restraint when he interviewed transvestite hookers. Rather, they are mourning the loss of an ideological soulmate. Donahue’s departure means that the left is losing the best friend it has ever had on American television.
Ricki Lake may join PETA for a highly destructive anti-fur protest at ratings sweeps time — as she did in November 1994 — but for Donahue, left- wing politics was a regular event. Whether he was rallying for feminism, offering Carl Sagan and Ralph Nader a regular soapbox, or turning the airwaves over to Soviet officials frantically engaged in moral equivalence, Donahue was a relentless promoter of noxious ideas.
Donahue approached politics the way he did his guests on the show: Everybody just needed to understand one another better. There was no such thing as moral differences, just a lack of communication. Consider his 1987 take on U. S. – Soviet relations: “It’s ironic we should be so far apart today when only 40 years ago we were partners against a common enemy and we succeeded together to help virtue be the winner. Now we don’t know each other.”
Donahue understands almost everything. He understands that in New York City’s slums poverty produces “feelings of failure and frustration” that cause violence. He has even ventured to understand why feminists are accused of lacking a sense of humor.
In his quest for understanding, Donahue occasionally would try to look just l ike his guests. For a show on baldness he made himself bald. For a show on tran svestites he wore a skir t, for a show on nerds he went as a nerd, for a show on pregnancy he wore a stomach extender. With his taste for instant sensitivity, Donahue helped pioneer the concept of the sensitive man in the 1970s. Before him, a ” sensitive man” meant a guy who cut himself shaving easily; suddenly it was someone who understood women.
Of course, some things Donahue just can’t understand. Religious people escape his understanding. Donahue has always seemed to consider his Catholic upbringing in Cleveland the original sin for which he must endlessly atone. Of his childhood as an altar boy and observant Catholic, he told a magazine interviewer, “You simply can’t come out of that experience without traces of sexism on your soul.” And in his 1979 autobiography, he wrote that “the Church is not irrelevant, it is destructive. It is unnecessarily destructive.”
Thirteen years later, he continued to wage holy war against its teachings. The “Church’s treatment of divorced and remarried Catholics is . . . un- Christian and absurd,” said Phil the moral theologian. “I will continue to speak out against these features of Catholic orthodoxy which are not divinely inspired.”
Strong stuff. But then again, Donahue had no problem taking sides. When Oliver North was his guest in 1991, Donahue opined that the 1986 bombing of Libya made us “look like terrorists ourselves,” and said of North’s assistance to the Nicaraguan contras, “If we don’t have the guts to declare war, you don’t have the right to be . . . holding slide presentations for the old, wealthy women to give you money to fight Commies.”
Not that Donahue had anything against communists. Some of his best friends were communists. In 1991, he and his pal Vladimir Pozner — the American-born former Soviet mouthpiece who excused totalitarian repression and tyranny with a Brooklyn accent — teamed up for their own talk show on CNBC. Pozner and Donahue, which recently went off the air, was fine just as long as you weren’t looking for ideological diversity. When Posner decried the erosion of rights in the United States, claiming that not much had changed since the 1857 Dred Scott case, he didn’t get an argument from Donahue.
Perhaps some minor changes since Dred Scott — the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, the 1964 Civil Rights Act — escaped Donahue’s memory. Donahue chimed in with his own list of infringements of civil liberties, including the 1986 Supreme Court decision that upheld Georgia’s sodomy law.
Donahue’s politics were also much in evidence in 1994 when he unsuccessfully sought permission to televise the execution of a North Carolina man. He no doubt wanted to dramatize the cruelty of capital punishment and score a huge ratings bonanza. (Who says you can’t do well and do good?)
When Donahue quit, Michael Stern, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, told USA Today, “He’s a polite and civilized gentleman. Such a person has no place on network television or big syndicated TV.” Actually, with Donahue off the air, the only people likely to be left out in the cold are those who need their daily leftist fix. Doubtless, Phil understands their pain.
Evan Gahr, a New York Post editorial writer, contributed “Be Casual or Else” to last week’s issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
