A Lesson From the Death of Phil Donahue

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

I remember watching The Phil Donahue Show with my dad. Informative and willing to tackle controversial issues, the show proved remarkably popular, a tribute to its host, Phil Donahue, who recently died at the age of 88. The show was briefly revived in 2002 on MSNBC, where it was the network’s highest-rated offering until it was cancelled.

Here’s what the Boston Globe had to say yesterday about Phil Donahue’s show in 2002 and why MSNBC cancelled it:

Donahue returned briefly to television in 2002, hosting another “Donahue” show on MSNBC. The station canceled it after six months, citing low ratings.

OK, the suits at MSNBC may have cited “low ratings,” but the real reason was that Phil Donahue was asking uncomfortable questions in the run up to the Iraq War. His show was perceived as anti-war and therefore unprofitable and “unpatriotic” to those suits. And so he was cancelled.

As Donahue says above, his show wasn’t “good for business,” and the business in America was (and is) war.

At Common Dreams, Jeff Cohen further explained why Donahue’s show was axed by MSNBC:

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits” – NBCand MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration, and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because – as theleaked internal memo said – Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, congressmembers Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on US TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned – never having faced such questioning from a US journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore – known to oppose the pending Iraq War – she was told she’d need to book three right-wingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.

Keep this in mind if you watch MSNBC today, currently airing glowing coverage of the Democrats and the war machine. In fact, keep this in mind if you watch any corporate-owned news (CON) network.

And to Phil Donahue: Respect.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.