After I learn that Phil Donahue—who for over a quarter-century reigned as “The King of Daytime TV”—had died this previous Sunday, I grinned and rubbed my palms on the prospect of issuing a robustly defamatory obituary.
It’s virtually comical what number of occasions I’ve already written about Donahue. I’d by no means forged him in a very good mild, and almost all my scorn hinged on the truth that he was a outstanding “male feminist” again when such creatures hardly existed. A fast search of his identify on my onerous drive yielded 5 separate occasions I’d mocked the person born in Cleveland as Philip John Donahue 88 years in the past.
I’d first written about Donahue within the 1991 debut concern of my journal ANSWER Me!, when he nonetheless dominated daytime TV speak exhibits. In an article referred to as “Twelve Steps to Hell,” I recounted attending a gathering of Marijuana Nameless:
“Shhh!” whispers the group chief, a pepper-haired graduate of the Phil Donahue faculty of male submissiveness.
Donahue will get two nods in my 1997 guide The Redneck Manifesto, revealed a 12 months after his pioneering daytime speak present had completed a 29-year run. In Chapter 7, I point out a novel referred to as Youngsters of a Misplaced Spirit, which is a couple of Caucasian girl who will get raped by a Sasquatch and favored it a lot that she joins their clan:
Camille is ultimately saved from Otta’s additional sexual predation by a valiant, delicate, Alan Alda/Phil Donahue-style Sasquatch named Geh. He massages her again and playfully engages in snowball fights together with her.
In Chapter 8 of Redneck Manifesto, which coated Nineties anti-government traits, particularly the militia motion within the wake of 1995’s Oklahoma Metropolis Bombing, I convey up Donahue once more:
White-haired pussy-whip Phil Donahue needed to lambaste the militias as backwoods honky bigots, so his TV producers flew within the chief of the Ohio Militia. Donahue should have shit his grownup diapers to find the person was BLACK.
It could be one other 14 years earlier than I wrote about Donahue, this time in a 2011 weekly information roundup:
I normally favor Aussies to Oprah Winfrey, however I’m afraid I’ll need to take her facet on this controversy. This has solely occurred as soon as earlier than in historical past—when she drove Phil Donahue off community TV.
I discovered a must convey up Donahue yet another time in a 2014 piece referred to as “Feminism As a Mating Technique Amongst Beta Males”:
My instinctual intestine revulsion for male feminists grew deeper all through the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties as Alan Alda and Phil Donahue taught a complete era of well-meaning but gullible TV-watching pubescent males that it was horny for guys to be feminists. They’re those who killed it for males, not less than white ones, on TV. (Kurt Cobain would do the identical factor for white males in music about 15 years later.)
Now, ten years later, Phil Donahue has lastly issued his demise rattle. England’s The Occasions says “he was hailed as a proto male feminist” and Salon.com is eulogizing him as somebody who “confirmed how feminism and open-mindedness are essential for democracy”:
With an viewers of predominantly ladies on the airwaves and within the studio…his program took ladies critically as an viewers, providing them not cooking suggestions and style recommendation, however substantive discussions on politics, race, gender, psychology, and the humanities.
OK, however the principle cause his daytime studio viewers was predominantly composed of girls was as a result of again then, ladies have been extra “oppressed” than males within the sense that they didn’t need to work as a lot as they do now. However steadily, enabled by males corresponding to Phil Donahue, feminism “liberated” ladies from languid daytime idleness whereas their youngsters have been at school. What typically passes discover about feminism is that it might have been little greater than a sordid plot to drive down wages and male incomes energy by forcing ladies to affix the labor drive.
To be honest, although, Phil Donahue pioneered greater than being a high-profile male simp. He first lower his tooth as a daytime TV speak present host within the tiny market of Dayton, OH, the place he defined that “stars weren’t accessible to us. So I knew that the one method we’d survive can be points.” He targeted on controversial, hot-button subjects—one per hourlong present, in entrance of a reside viewers, from whom he took questions as he prowled the studio together with his wi-fi mic.
The Phil Donahue Present’s first visitor, in 1967, was outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, again when atheism was way more offensive to the general public. A 12 months later, whereas nonetheless in Dayton, Donahue interviewed what he referred to as “an actual, reside gay” lengthy earlier than gayness had grow to be mainstreamed. In 1974, he moved the present to the massively bigger market of Chicago, the place it was rechristened as Donahue.
Phil Donahue was undeniably biased towards straight white males. Like so many who adopted in his wake, he seemingly refused to simply accept the chance that there may need been something fallacious with Jews, ladies, gays, or blacks. He helped nudge previously fringe subjects corresponding to Black Energy, transvestitism, abortion, and anti-war sentiments into the mainstream. Within the Nineteen Seventies and early Nineteen Eighties, although, the institution media wasn’t almost as canonically leftist as it’s now, and Donahue actually performed a task in pushing issues in that route. To his credit score, although, he by no means relented in his dedication to masking controversial figures and subjects.
In 1985, the Donahue present made its ultimate transfer, this time to New York. By then, what was thought of “fringe” and “controversial” had shifted considerably since 1967. From 1985 to 1996, this led to some fascinating exchanges between Donahue and folks whom he tried to make look silly however who solely wound up making him look dumb—however he stored letting them communicate, unedited and in entrance of a reside viewers.
Such figures included Donald Trump, Milton Friedman, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, and the ever-delightful Khalid Muhammad.
When Donahue began filming a brand new present on MSNBC in 2002, he allowed Jared Taylor to mop the ground with him. However MSNBC fired Donahue not lengthy after his present began. They claimed it was as a result of low scores, however not solely did he have the community’s highest-rated present, a leaked MSNBC inside memo revealed that his dismissal was as a result of his opposition to the looming Iraq Battle again when all of the institution media, left and proper, had Battle Fever and feared upsetting the general public, advertisers, and/or America’s military-industrial complicated.
It’s all the time refreshing, if a bit discombobulating, to understand that somebody you thought was an entire idiot had benefit. Even when Phil Donahue disagreed with somebody, he allow them to speak.
There has by no means been anybody fairly like him, earlier than or since. Each the mainstream media and all of podcasting—that are primarily “speak exhibits,” however largely with out audiences and steadily with out friends—appear to be within the thrall of our nauseatingly polarized “epistemic disaster” the place if opposing viewpoints are supplied, they’re usually ripped out of context and wildly misrepresented.
In being such an avid proponent of feminism, although, Donahue could have unwittingly let Pandora out of her field. Though he appeared to have had a cheerful 44-year marriage to his unabashedly feminist spouse Marlo Thomas, others haven’t been so fortunate.
Comic Phil Hartman, who brilliantly lampooned Donahue’s subservience to the feminine trigger in this clip from Saturday Evening Stay, was one such case. In 1998, Hartman’s drug-and-alcohol-addled spouse shot and killed him whereas he was sleeping in mattress.
