Topic of discussion: Phil Donahue (1935-2024)

Donahue was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 21, 1935. His first foray into the broadcasting industry came after his junior year at Notre Dame, where he studied business administration and took a summer job at WNDU, a local university-owned station. After graduating, he began working as a substitute announcer at another local TV/radio station before landing a job as program director at a station in Michigan and at WHIO-AM-TV in Dayton, where he interviewed Jimmy Hoffa and hosted a radio talk show called “Conversation Piece.” Although his frustrations over not being able to get national jobs led him to temporarily leave broadcasting altogether to work for a trading stamp company, he returned in 1967 with a new television morning talk show in Dayton called “The Phil Donahue Show,” which would change television history forever.

Then, as now, most major talk shows were broadcast from New York or Los Angeles, because those were where the personalities you expected to see on the couch would congregate. Dayton, on the other hand, was never known as a media hotspot, and it just wasn’t the way those personalities would hop on a plane to Ohio to appear on a talk show to promote their new movies. Realizing this, Donahue decided to tweak the format in a way that would make the most of his limited resources. Instead of struggling to find the standard two or three guests per show, each talking about their own specific thing, he spent each episode focusing on a single guest and topic. These topics would largely eschew the standard talk show frothiness in favor of more serious subjects that reflected the increasingly tumultuous times. Perhaps most significantly, he transformed the audience in his studio from passive to active participants, involving them in the events by coming to their seats to deepen their thoughts on the subject or letting them pose their own questions to the guests.

From its very first episode (featuring Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the famous atheist who had just helped lead the Supreme Court case that banned prayer in schools), the show was a hotbed of controversy. It tackled topics that had previously been off-limits, including premarital sex, prison reform, homosexuality, and other social, political, and cultural issues of the day. The show was an immediate success, and in 1969 it was relaunched in national syndication. By 1971, it was on 44 stations nationwide, and in 1974 the show moved its base to Chicago, where it was renamed “Donahue” and produced out of studio facilities at WGN, soon to be acquired by the emerging syndicator Multimedia Program Productions.