Phil Donahue (1935-2024) – Greatest Champion of Free Speech for the Peoples’ Interest of the 20th Century
It was 1967 when the national media was covering our auto safety initiatives. A call came on the hallway phone outside my $90-a-month boarding room. “Hello, I’m Phil Donahue. I want to invite you on my new syndicated television talk show in Dayton, Ohio. You’ve come a long way without my help, but can you please come here? You’ll make me into a Big Act. You can talk about and say anything you want for an hour.” He then described some of his controversial guests. I remember thinking, “This is a General Motors factory town and he wants me there!!!” Clearly, he stood out with his polite insistence from the numerous invitations I was receiving from media shows outside Washington.
I flew to Dayton, landing just before midnight. Surprise. Who was there as I was getting off the plane? A gracious Phil Donahue. He drove me to the hotel.
That was the kind of earnestness, authentic courtesy and persistence in giving voice to the underdogs in our society that propelled him for nearly 30 years to become America’s leading daytime national TV talk show host.
Of course, he was much more than that during his over 6000 shows. In between his shows with flamboyant entertainers (to keep a large audience) he offered hundreds of hours to compelling and controversial leaders of emerging social justice movements and the people who were harmed by wrongdoers.
“Hot topics,” he called them. When necessary, he would take a Donahue Show to “hot spots” such as to Chernobyl in Ukraine, the site of a disastrous partial meltdown in 1986 of a giant nuclear power plant whose radioactivity forced the permanent abandonment of nearby villages. I can still see him, with his ever-present microphone, standing by the eerily swinging doors of the empty houses.
Other talk show hosts are cowed by their paying advertisers. Not Phil. He took using the people’s public airwaves seriously. One show on cheating auto dealers led the Dayton auto dealers to boycott the show. This didn’t faze Phil. His show’s audience grew so that by 1974 he felt he could move to Chicago and then to New York City in 1985.
Daring but self-effacing, Donahue knew his guests, though outspoken and challenging to power structures, represented large numbers of silenced Americans. Prominent leaders of women’s equality (then called the Women’s Lib
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