Pioneering TV Talk Show Beta Male Phil Donahue Has Died, And I Finally Have Something Nice to Say About Him

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When I read that Phil Donahue—who for over a quarter-century reigned as “The King of Daytime TV”—had died this past Sunday, I grinned and rubbed my hands at the prospect of issuing a robustly defamatory obituary.

 It’s almost comical how many times I’ve already written about Donahue. I’d never cast him in a good light, and nearly all my scorn hinged on the fact that he was a prominent “male feminist” back when such creatures hardly existed. A quick search of his name on my hard drive yielded five separate times I’d mocked the man born in Cleveland as Philip John Donahue 88 years ago.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here ^[3]. To download the mp3, right-click here ^[3] and choose “save link/target as.”

https://counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/audio-articles/GoadDonahue.m4a ^[3]

I’d first written about Donahue in the 1991 debut issue of my magazine ANSWER Me!, when he still ruled daytime TV talk shows. In an article called “Twelve Steps to Hell,” I recounted attending a meeting of Marijuana Anonymous:

“Shhh!” whispers the group leader, a pepper-haired graduate of the Phil Donahue school of male submissiveness.

Donahue gets two nods in my 1997 book The Redneck Manifesto, published a year after his pioneering daytime talk show had finished a 29-year run. In Chapter 7, I mention a novel called Children of a Lost Spirit ^[4], which is about a Caucasian woman who gets raped by a Sasquatch and liked it so much that she joins their clan:

Camille is eventually saved from Otta’s further sexual predation by a valiant, sensitive, Alan Alda/Phil Donahue-style Sasquatch named Geh. He massages her back and playfully engages in snowball fights with her.

In Chapter 8 of Redneck Manifesto, which covered 1990s anti-government trends, especially the militia movement in the wake of 1995’s Oklahoma City Bombing, I bring up Donahue again:

White-haired pussy-whip Phil Donahue wanted to lambaste the militias as backwoods honky bigots, so his TV producers flew in the leader of the Ohio Militia. Donahue must have shit his adult diapers to discover the man was BLACK.

It would be another 14 years before I wrote about Donahue, this time in a 2011 weekly news ^[5] roundup:

I usually prefer Aussies to Oprah Winfrey, but I’m afraid I’ll have to take her side in this controversy. This has only happened once before in history—when she drove Phil Donahue off network TV.

I found a need to bring up Donahue one more time in a 2014 piece called “Feminism As a Mating Strategy Among Beta Males ^[6]”:

My instinctual gut revulsion for male feminists grew deeper throughout the 1970s and 1980s as Alan Alda and Phil Donahue taught a whole generation of well-meaning yet gullible TV-watching pubescent males that it was sexy for guys to be feminists. They’re the ones who killed it for males, at least white ones, on TV. (Kurt Cobain would do the same thing for white males in music about 15 years later.)

Now, ten years later, Phil Donahue has finally issued his death rattle. England’s The Times ^[7] says “he was hailed as a proto male feminist” and Salon.com ^[8] is eulogizing him as someone who “showed how feminism and open-mindedness are crucial for democracy”:

With an audience of predominantly women on the airwaves and in the studio…his program took women seriously as an audience, offering them not cooking tips and fashion advice, but substantive discussions on politics, race, gender, psychology, and the arts.

OK, but the main reason his daytime studio audience was predominantly composed of women was because back then, women were more “oppressed” than men in the sense that they didn’t have to work ^[9] as much as they do now. But gradually, enabled by men such as Phil Donahue, feminism “liberated” women from languid daytime idleness while their kids were in school. What often passes notice about feminism is that it may have been little more than a sordid plot to drive down wages and male earning power by forcing women to join the labor force.

To be fair, though, Phil Donahue pioneered more than being a high-profile male simp. He first cut his teeth as a daytime TV talk show host in the tiny market of Dayton, OH, where he explained that “stars were not available to us. So I knew that the only way we would survive would be issues.” He focused on controversial, hot-button topics—one per hourlong show, in front of a live audience, from whom he took questions as he prowled the studio with his wireless mic.

The Phil Donahue Show’s first guest, in 1967, was outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, back when atheism was far more offensive to the public. A year later, while still in Dayton, Donahue interviewed what he called “a real, live homosexual ^[10]” long before gayness had become mainstreamed. In 1974, he moved the show to the massively larger market of Chicago, where it was rechristened as Donahue.

Phil Donahue was undeniably biased against straight white males. Like so many who followed in his wake, he seemingly refused to accept the possibility that there might have been anything wrong with Jews, women, gays, or blacks. He helped nudge formerly fringe topics such as Black Power, transvestitism, abortion, and anti-war sentiments into the mainstream. In the 1970s and early 1980s, though, the establishment media wasn’t nearly as canonically leftist as it is now, and Donahue certainly played a role in pushing things in that direction. To his credit, though, he never relented in his dedication to covering controversial figures and topics.

In 1985, the Donahue show made its final move, this time to New York. By then, what was considered “fringe” and “controversial” had shifted significantly since 1967. From 1985 to 1996, this led to some fascinating exchanges between Donahue and people whom he tried to make look foolish but who only wound up making him look dumb—but he kept letting them speak, unedited and in front of a live audience.

Such figures included Donald Trump ^[11], Milton Friedman ^[12], Louis Farrakhan ^[13], David Duke ^[14], and the ever-delightful Khalid Muhammad ^[15].

When Donahue started filming a new show on MSNBC in 2002, he allowed Jared Taylor ^[16] to mop the floor with him. But MSNBC fired Donahue not long after his show started. They claimed it was due to low ratings, but not only did he have the network’s highest-rated show, a leaked MSNBC internal memo ^[17] revealed that his dismissal was due to his opposition to the looming Iraq War back when all of the establishment media, left and right, had War Fever and feared upsetting the public, advertisers, and/or America’s military-industrial complex.

It’s always refreshing, if a bit discombobulating, to realize that someone you thought was a complete fool had merit. Even when Phil Donahue disagreed with someone, he let them talk.

There has never been anyone quite like him, before or since. Both the mainstream media and all of podcasting—which are essentially “talk shows,” but mostly without audiences and frequently without guests—seem to be in the thrall of our nauseatingly polarized “epistemic crisis ^[18]” where if opposing viewpoints are offered, they are typically ripped out of context and wildly misrepresented.

In being such an avid proponent of feminism, though, Donahue may have unwittingly let Pandora out of her box. Although he seemed to have had a happy 44-year marriage to his unabashedly feminist wife Marlo Thomas, others haven’t been so lucky.

Comedian Phil Hartman, who brilliantly lampooned Donahue’s subservience to the female cause in this clip ^[19] from Saturday Night Live, was one such case. In 1998, Hartman’s drug-and-alcohol-addled wife shot and killed him while he was sleeping in bed.