Phil Donahue Dead: Pioneering Talk Show Host Was 88

Successful national talk show host Phil Donahue, who entertained, challenged and informed two generations of daytime television viewers, died on Sunday night following a long illness, Variety has confirmed. He was 88.

The news of his death was first announced Monday morning on the “Today” show. “Groundbreaking TV talk show journalist Phil Donahue died Sunday night at home surrounded by his wife of 44 years Marlo Thomas, his sister, his children, grandchildren and his beloved golden retriever Charlie,” his family said in a statement. “Donahue was 88 years old and passed away peacefully following a long illness.”

The pioneering, issue-oriented “The Phil Donahue Show” was picked up for national syndication in 1969, was redubbed “Donahue” in 1974 and eventually reached more than 200 stations across the country. It ran until 1996, when the daytime talkshow landscape had changed radically into a tabloid circus and competitors including Oprah Winfrey had drawn away his female viewership. While Donahue was not above resorting to sensationalist topics, his show was still rather tame compared to the imitators like “Sally Jesse Raphael” and “Jerry Springer” that followed.

Never a stranger to controversy or hotly debated sociopolitical issues, the silver-haired Donahue brought a strong journalistic spine to his popular show and was a potent contrast to the regular celebrity chatter and soap opera menu of daytime television.

In all, Donahue received nine Daytime Emmys and 21 nominations as well as a primetime Emmy for his special “Donahue and Kids.” (Other nighttime specials included the five-part “Phil Donahue Examines the Human Animal,” first aired in 1986.) Donahue received a Peabody Award in 1981.

Donahue’s nonthreatening, paternal image was key to his appeal, as was his rapport with the women in his studio audience. Another factor was his penetrating interviewing style, which was forceful without being belligerent. Over the years he interviewed heads of state, politicians, feminists, Ku Klux Klan members, porn stars and ’60s radicals. He was the only talk show host to land South Africa’s Nelson Mandela right after his release from prison. So contentious was his program that Newsweek once wrote “one sometimes suspects that Donahue’s idea of the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who have had a child by artificial insemination.” And in fact, such a couple appeared on the show in 1979.

On the road to becoming a cultural touchstone of his era, Donahue also became rich: According to Variety, he was pulling down $20 million a year in salary, Multimedia stock and other options by the mid-’90s.

Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland, Ohio on Dec. 21, 1935. After his junior year at Notre Dame, where he majored in business, Donahue took a summer job at WNDU, the university-owned local station, working his way up to announcer. After graduating with a B.B.A., he started as a summer replacement announcer for KYW-AM TV, a television and radio outlet in Cleveland, and left only to return shortly thereafter, unhappy with his job and unable to break into full-time TV journalism.

In 1958 he went to work for WABJ, a small radio station in Michigan, as its program/news director, which led to a job at WHIO-AM-TV in Dayton, where he honed his reporting skills, landing interviews with the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and Billie Sol Estes. He also hosted a daily 90-minute radio talkshow called “Conversation Piece” in 1963, attracting a largely female audience. But he was frustrated in his efforts to land a job with national reach and quit broadcasting in 1967 to work as a salesman for E.F. MacDonald, a trading stamp company in Dayton.

Within months, however, he was back to hosting a morning interview program on WLWD TV in Dayton, “The Phil Donahue Show.” Unable to lure prominent personalities to town, Donahue used the disadvantage to his advantage, interviewing only one person and dealing with just one issue per show and, most importantly, interacting heavily with the studio audience. His frequent visits to the audience and encouragement of its participation would quickly become the show’s trademark.

His first guest was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist whose case against school prayer had been successfully argued in front of the Supreme Court; the show drew heavy viewer response. Soon Donahue was tackling controversial subjects like premarital sex and homosexuality as well as other social, political and lifestyle issues. He later visited the Ohio State Penitentiary and the Ohio Reformatory for Women and spent time delving into prison life. He brought in the president of General Motors to debate consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

The show was such a success in Dayton that the Avco Broadcasting Co. began syndicating it to its other stations around the country in 1969. Two years later, the show was popular on 44 stations, mostly in the Midwest. The show moved to the WGN-TV station facilities in Chicago and was renamed “Donahue” in 1974.

Multimedia Program Prods. bought “Donahue” in 1976, and by the end of the ’70s, it was broadcast on more than 200 stations, mainly network affiliates, reaching 9 million viewers, the overwhelming majority them women. By then he was receiving $500,000 a year and a percentage of the show’s revenues. As Donahue’s popularity increased, his per annum would rise above $1 million, and he even contracted to appear on “The Today Show” on a regular basis from 1979-82 and on ABC’s late-night “The Last Word” for a year after that.

In 1985, the show moved to New York and began airing live (until then it had been live only in Chicago and on tape in most other places). The same year Donahue and Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pozner initiated dialogues via satellite between American and Russian audiences in Leningrad, and he later traveled to the Soviet Union as the first American talk show host to be taped inside the Communist country and the first Western journalist to visit Chernobyl after the nuclear accident. News/talk show “Pozner/Donahue,” co-hosted by the pair, ran on CNBC in syndication from 1991-94. During the 1992 primary season, he hosted a debate between future president Bill Clinton and one of his opponents, former California governor Jerry Brown.

By the mid-’90s, with more than 6,000 shows aired, Donahue became a victim of his own success. Other talkshows, equally or more salacious, proliferated, and in order to compete, Donahue had to constantly raise (or lower) the bar. His chief rival Oprah Winfrey diluted his female base. Other shows, seeking to appeal to younger viewers, went even further in pursuing sensational topics. Slowly, he began losing major markets until by 1996 he and Multimedia called it quits.

In 2002-03, Donahue briefly returned to television with a self-titled MSNBC talkshow in which he interviewed newsmakers on social and political issues. Its audience was dwarfed by that of Fox Network’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” with which it competed, but drew the highest ratings of any show on the cable network at the time. Nevertheless, MSNBC canceled “Donahue” after six months, leading some observers to conclude that the network felt the show unwelcome given the political climate prevailing in the country at the time.

“Network management apparently didn’t care for the anchor’s left-leaning politics, a contention that echoes a recently leaked internal memo that found Donahue’s politics would not have been palatable to aud[ience]s in wartime,” Variety said at the time.

Oprah Winfrey praised Donahue in a September 2002 interview as she was contemplating running an anti-war series on her own show, saying: “The bottom line is we need you, Phil, because we need to be challenged by the voice of dissent.”

With Ellen Spiro, Donahue wrote, directed and produced the 2007 documentary feature “Body of War,” an indictment of the Iraq War that followed a single injured soldier after his return from combat. Variety called it “a powerful argument against impetuous decisions, be they to join the military or to attack a country.”

Donahue remained a presence on television even after he didn’t have his own program, appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Tavis Smiley,” “Real Time With Bill Maher,” “Hannity,” “The Piers Morgan Show” and “Moyers & Company.” In November 2010, Donahue appeared on an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” along with fellow former talkshow hosts Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake and Montel Williams.

He also appeared in documentaries including “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe” (2009); 2011’s “Good Riddance,” about Madalyn Murray O’Hair; 2013’s “Finding Vivian Maier”; and, along with many other notable people, in 2014’s “Unity.”

Donahue was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1993 and won an ATAS lifetime achievement award in 1996.

Survivors include Donahue’s second wife, Marlo Thomas, whom he married in 1980; and five children from his first marriage.