Q&A; WITH PHIL DONAHUE : Breaking a News ‘Chokehold’

\o7 NEW YORK\f7 —  When Phil Donahue and his producers booked atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as their first guest on a local talk show in Dayton, Ohio, they helped to revolutionize daytime TV. Making the studio audience a key element in the show and booking guests on subjects from abortion to the Vietnam War, Donahue, a former radio-news producer, showed that the largely female audience, as he put it, was interested in a lot more than “covered dishes and needlepoint.”

That first show was 25 years ago this month. On Sunday at 9 p.m., Donahue will celebrate the anniversary with a two-hour special on NBC.

In recent years, the TV landscape has become littered with talk shows, and some TV reviewers have criticized Donahue for such ratings-getting shows as an infamous 1988 program in which he wore a dress to introduce transvestite fashions. Although Oprah Winfrey has taken over the No. 1 slot as the highest-rated daytime host, Donahue holds the No. 2 slot, ahead of a variety of competitors from Sally Jessy Raphael to Montel Williams.

Donahue, 57, gained attention during the Presidential campaign with aggressive interviewing of the candidates, including one in which a member of the audience criticized him for “attacking” Bill Clinton’s character. Donahue’s contract runs through the end of the year and, while he says he would hate to leave talk shows just as presidential politics have come to them, he hints that he might consider running for office himself in 1994, perhaps as a congressional candidate from New York.

Question: How did you feel when the woman in the audience stood up and attacked you for attacking Clinton on the Gennifer Flowers question when, as she said, there were so many other important issues facing the country?

Answer: I don’t like to be booed, and I don’t like being criticized. She was very lucid in her criticism. But if I had it to do again, I’d do the same thing. The entire press corps was frozen in place on the issue of Gennifer Flowers and (a rumor of infidelity) involving President Bush. . . . The issue is not that the press decides whether infidelity is a determining factor in the voters’ minds. The issue is that the press has a responsibility to probe the candidate’s character, and let the voters decide.

Q: But it was the audience that booed you.

A: Well, it’s been a rough year for the press. Nobody likes us.

Q: Do you consider yourself a member of the press?

A: That’s an interesting argument: Am I a journalist, am I not a journalist? First, talk-show hosts weren’t journalists. Then we weren’t considered serious journalists. The mainstream journalists looked down on talk-show people and said, in a very condescending way, “We’re the news, not you.”

We already have a real concentration of ownership in the media, with some media companies worried more about their debt than about the news. The idea is that you want a whole bunch of people gathering information because if you have a crowd, somewhere in the collective middle will be found the truth.

President Reagan pretty much stiff-armed the media during his Administration. These mainstream people are the ones who missed Iran-scam, missed the savings-and-loan crisis, missed BCCI. And these are the same people saying, “You’re not the news, and you don’t know how to ask follow-up questions”?

Q: What role do you think the talk shows played in this campaign?

A: According to several exit polls that I saw, seeing the candidates on talk shows was said to be one of the most important factors in people’s minds. Politics is one of my favorite subjects--the staff knows that I wish we could do it just about every day. I think this is a very exciting trend. In earlier campaigns, we asked both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis to come on the show, before 10 million viewers, and they (wouldn’t), even though they were behind. I think they thought it was not presidential. . . .

I think the Clinton-Gore campaign took the chokehold of the presidential process away from the (evening newscasts) and brought it down to a saxophone gig on a late-night talk show (Arsenio Hall), followed by a very good interview with an African-American personality who’s at the center of popular culture. I’m not saying talk shows should replace “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation”--we should be additions to these venues. . . . In fact, as much as I admire the Democrats’ expanding the venues, I think they should not have bypassed the traditional programs. Al Gore did “Meet the Press,” but Bill Clinton after last May did not do “Meet the Press,” “Face the Nation” or the David Brinkley show. If you’re going to be brave enough to send our children to war, you ought to be brave enough to face Sam Donaldson!

Q: When you began doing your first show in Ohio, how did you hit on the idea of covering a lot of issues that hadn’t been covered in daytime TV before?

A: We got lucky because we discovered early on that the usual idea of women’s programming was a narrow, sexist view. I’d been the host of a radio show, and I’d seen what lights up the phones. We found that women were interested in a lot more than covered dishes and needlepoint. We televised a baby being born the first week we were on the air. We featured Jane Fonda and other people protesting the Vietnam War. . . . When we put a gay man on the air in the 1960s, we got irate mail from people, who were afraid their kids would “catch” being gay, how dare we. . . . These were issues that people cared about. The determining factor is, “Will the woman in the fifth row be moved to stand up and say something?” And there’s a lot that will get her to stand up.

Q: How has the talk-show landscape changed since you began?

A: It’s a much busier street. Our sales people and others probably are more aware of how yesterday’s show did in the overnight ratings. You have to tap-dance faster. The program has to be compelling, right from the beginning. Viewers are out there with a (remote control), and they can zap you like that.

Q: Does that put you under more pressure to put on sensational topics, like male strippers? Can you, as you did in the past, to cite one example, put Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon on the air for an hour?

A: You do have to do more to call attention to yourself in this environment. But I think we have more variation in our topics than any other daytime talk show, and we’re proud of that. We go from male strippers to presidential candidates to Nelson Mandela, Sharon, both sides of the abortion debate.

You can’t do the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day, and you can’t do “ain’t it awful” topics--”friendly fire” in the Gulf War or Somalia--five days a week, because people won’t watch it. But it is also true that people won’t watch male strippers five days a week, either.

Q: What do you think of Oprah Winfrey? It can’t be as much fun to be one of several talk-show hosts after being king of the hill for so long.

A: I’ll admit there was some ego-damage around here--me and my staff--because it took us 10 years to become a national program, and she did it in one. But I admire Oprah’s work; she has brought a lot of new excitement to talk shows, and we have all benefited. There are more people watching daytime TV, and our show has never been more commercial than it is today, in terms of income generation and sponsors.

Q: Why do people come on your show and others to talk about the most intimate details of their lives, telling you and the TV audience something they might not tell their best friend?

A: I think it’s mostly to help other people. If, for example, they were abused as a child and have walked around with a brick in their chest keeping this dark secret, and they finally are healed through therapy, they may want to say to others, “Don’t carry this brick in your chest--you can heal.” If they were married and looked up to discover that their sex life was nonexistent, got some help and saved their marriage, they may want to tell others, “We’re your basic American couple, and here’s how we got help.”

Q: You had a program about “Baby Jesse,” where a couple came on and asked for a heart donor and transplant for their child. (A donor and hospital were found, and the now 6-year-old “Baby Jesse” was in the audience for the taping of Donahue’s NBC special.) You got a lot of positive feedback on that show. But did you feel in any way that it was exploitative to have a couple on the air pleading for a transplant?

A: We had another young woman on the air, 17 years old and dying of cystic fibrosis. She needed both a heart and lung transplant (from one donor). We went on the air live on Monday with her parents; (there was no donor, and) she died on Friday. I attended her funeral. . . . Not for a single moment did I feel exploitative. If I had that situation, I’d hope there would be a TV show available to me.

Q: Do you ever have days when you’re not “up” for doing this?

A: I don’t whistle to work every day, but the audience helps you. They’ve traveled a long way to get here, and they’re kind of sitting there, saying, “OK, pal, this better be good.” It’s like being the host at a party. You want people to have a good time; you don’t want them staring down into the potato chips.

Q: What will you do when your contract is up? Would you consider running for office yourself?

A: I’ve had some conversations over the years with various people, some of them . . . in Congress, (about possibly running for office). I haven’t discarded the notion. But do I want to beg for all that money to run? Would I survive the first negative ad? I’d hate to leave talk shows just as the presidential candidates are coming to us. Doing this show was never more exciting than it is today.