Remembering TV Icon Phil Donahue: He Brought Antiwar Voices to the Airwaves Until MSNBC Fired Him

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency: Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman, here in Chicago with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end this hour looking at the life and legacy of the pioneering TV host Phil Donahue, who died Sunday at the age of 88. Beginning in the 1960s, Donahue hosted a groundbreaking daily talk show that helped transform daytime TV. He tackled major social and political issues, including women’s rights, child abuse in the Catholic Church, prisons, racism and the Middle East. Over his career, Donahue won 20 Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. He ended his daytime show in 1996 but returned to the airwaves in 2002 to host a primetime talk show on MSNBC in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It became the most popular talk show on MSNBC, but Donahue was fired in 2003 for airing antiwar voices.

AMY GOODMAN: An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a, quote, “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war” because, quote, “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives,” unquote. The memo also warned Donahue was providing a, quote, “home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity,” unquote.

In 2013, Juan González and I spoke to Phil Donahue in our New York studio about his firing.

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, I think what happened to me, the biggest lesson, I think, is the — how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage. This was a decision — my decision — the decision to release me came from far above. This was not an assistant program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC. They were terrified of the antiwar voice. And that is not an overstatement. Antiwar voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an antiwar voice on a cable channel that you own; Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer. So, by the way, I had to have two conservatives on for every liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone, but I couldn’t have Dennis Kucinich on alone. I was considered two liberals. It really is funny almost, when you look back on how — how the management was just frozen by the antiwar voice. We were scolds. We weren’t patriotic. American people disagreed with us. And we weren’t good for business.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Phil, the irony that MSNBC now is supposedly this liberal —

PHIL DONAHUE: It’s amazing, really.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —the liberal network now?

PHIL DONAHUE: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You wonder, though, if another — if another move to war came, how liberal it would remain.

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, you know, the coin of the realm is the size of the audience. It’s important to see this. When a broadcasting executive gets out of bed in the morning, before his foot hits the floor, his thoughts are ratings. “What are my ratings?” Not unlike Wall Street people, who get their — and CEOs, their first thought is the price of their stock.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Phil Donahue speaking on Democracy Now! in 2013 about a decade after being fired from MSNBC in the leadup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

We’re joined now by Jeff Cohen, who worked as a senior producer on Phil Donahue’s MSNBC primetime show, and Jeff wrote about the experience in his book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media. Jeff Cohen is also the co-founder of the online action group RootsAction.org and founder of the media watch group FAIR — that’s Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. He’s a former professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College.

Jeff, it’s so interesting to be here in Chicago and so sad to hear about the news of Phil dying this weekend in New York, because while Phil started The Phil Donahue Show in Dayton, Ohio, as it was syndicated, he was here in Chicago, his show, for years. Can you talk about the life and legacy of Phil Donahue?

JEFF COHEN: Well, it was so exciting to hear Phil’s voice again from your interview from 2013. He changed television. He changed our country. His three most frequent guests on his daytime show, where he took issues of civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, corporate greed — he mainstreamed those issues, and his three most frequent guests on the daytime show was the feminist advocate Gloria Steinem, it was Ralph Nader, the great foe of corporate greed, and Reverend Jesse Jackson. Aside from those three, he also kept featuring Dr. Sidney Wolfe, an ally of Ralph Nader, who talked about the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs.

So, it’s an incredible legacy. He had an audience of millions. Phil was a progressive. He was for peace and justice. He exuded it. It’s what made him tick. And, you know, I’ve read some of the obituaries in mainstream media talking about how Phil had shows about male strippers or he wore a dress on one show. The essence of Phil Donahue can be seen by who his guests were and what issues motivated him.

The beauty of the daytime show was that he had somewhat autonomy. He didn’t have suits. When we were at MSNBC together and we were getting these crazy orders that you’ve referenced already, Phil referred to the executives as “Suitville” or “the suits.” He didn’t have that in the daytime show. And he built this amazing thing. He opened the door for Oprah Winfrey. But mostly, he got the United States public, largely a female audience, talking about issues that no one else in television was talking about. So it was really something for him when he came out of a very happy retirement in the ’90s, and he goes to MSNBC, and all of a sudden the suits are saying, “Phil Donahue, we hired you. You’re one of the most famous people in the history of television. We’re going to tell you what to do.” And he bristled at it. He resisted it. They stifled him. And then, ultimately, they terminated all of us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jeff, he was also one of the few people who ever had Noam Chomsky, probably the most world-renowned U.S. intellectual of the 20th — of the late 20th century, on his show. Could you talk about that? And also, what happened when you — you were producer when he was at MSNBC. The experience that you saw firsthand with him and “the suits,” as you mentioned?

JEFF COHEN: Yeah. You know, I first met Phil Donahue when he had the big daytime show in the ’90s. And he wanted to do a show, “What’s Wrong with Corporate News Media?” And, you know, he wanted to feature FAIR’s critique. So he had me on with Michael Moore, Jim Hightower and Donna Edwards on the daytime show, “Here’s What’s Wrong with Corporate-Controlled U.S. News Media.”

So, he comes out of his happy retirement to go to MSNBC. And the suits, they got us there by promising we would be able to counter-program against Bill O’Reilly. We could have Noam Chomsky. We could have all of these independent experts that Democracy Now! audiences know about, but they were not getting on cable news. And they gave us assurances. That’s the reason that we went to MSNBC.

And there was a gap. We were hired in around March of 2002. We didn’t go on the air ’til July of 2002. By then, we know from the internal discussions — memos have leaked, emails have leaked — they were worried about, “Oh, hell, we’ve hired Phil Donahue.” And they started telling us we had to be balanced. And then, as the war neared, we got closer and closer to the Iraq invasion, they gave us that quota system that Phil talked about. If we had one guest on who was against the impending invasion, we had to have two that were pro-war. If we had two guests on the left, we had to have three on the right. And when a producer said, “I think I could book Michael Moore,” she was told — who was obviously known as a critic of the impending invasion, she was told, “For political balance, you’ll have to have three right-wingers to balance Michael Moore.” And, you know, I thought privately about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage could not accommodate the 38 right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

What has to be understood is, when we were terminated, we were the most-watched program on MSNBC. Now, that’s not saying a lot, because MSNBC was in third place. But it’s very rare that Suitville, the suits, at any network, will terminate their most-watched program. But that’s what they did, because they were scared witless that we were putting on experts — trying to. Often they would be outshouted because of that quota system.

We had Phyllis Bennis, we had Dennis Kucinich, we had Bernie Sanders talking about the war. We had Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. attorney general. And the next morning, what did the suits tell us? Ramsey Clark is never supposed to appear on MSNBC. There was some sort of blacklist that we didn’t know about. And remember, this was 2003. It wasn’t 1953 during the Joe McCarthy witch hunts. But we were constantly told by the suits, “Phil is coming across as un-American, as unpatriotic,” because he was doing journalism, which was a crime in that era. But we were given all this bunk from the suits, and it made you feel like you were back in 1953 and not 2003.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff, interestingly, in 2006, a few years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, I had an unusual experience related to Phil Donahue. It was the 10th anniversary of MSNBC, and I was invited on Hardball by Chris Matthews, along with Michael Smerconish, who would later become a host on CNN. We were standing outside 30 Rock. All the executives were on the top floor of 30 Rock, and they were about to have a big party. The audience was all standing there. They were told to wave the American flag if they wanted to ask a question. We were just coming out of a commercial.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to congratulate you, Chris, on 10 years of MSNBC, but I wish standing with you was Phil Donahue. He shouldn’t have been fired for expressing an antiwar point of view on the eve of the election. His point of view and the people he brought on were also important.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don’t know what the reasons were, but I doubt it was that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we have the MS — the NBC memo, that was a secret memo —

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Oh, OK, good.

AMY GOODMAN: — that came out, that said they didn’t want him to be the face of this network, an antiwar face, at a time when the other networks were waving the flag.

MICHAEL SMERCONISH: Could I answer the question? I’d love to answer that question.

AMY GOODMAN: Phil Donahue is a great patriot.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was talking about Phil Donahue on MSNBC after he was fired, on The Chris Matthews Show, who also ultimately left MSNBC. Jeff Cohen, Phil would later go on to produce Body of War, the story of an Iraq War veteran who was paralyzed, shot in Iraq, Tomas Young, in a remarkable film. But before we end, I wanted to ask you — you know, we’re here in Chicago for the Democratic convention, and you are co-founder of the online action group RootsAction. You served as senior producer, yes, on Phil’s show, but you also were one of the people now who pushed for Biden to step aside. We just have 30 seconds. If you can comment on that first night of the convention and the kind of swan song that President Biden gave there?

JEFF COHEN: It was so important that it was a swan song. The Democratic Party has been heading toward defeat and delivering the country for a neofascist victory of Trump and his movement in November. Twenty months ago, we started “Don’t Run, Joe.” It became “Step Aside, Joe.” We are so thrilled that he stepped aside. We took out ads in The Hill. We put out ads on MSNBC and CNN, on Washington, D.C., television and in a bunch of swing states. It took a long time. We wanted Joe to step aside so there’d be an open primary process. But believe me, it’s a good thing he stepped aside. Now there’s a chance that MAGA can be defeated in November. And there was no chance five weeks ago.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Cohen, we want to thank you for being with us, co-founder of the online action group RootsAction.org, served as senior producer on the Phil Donahue MSNBC primetime show and wrote about the experience in Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in the Corporate Media. Phil died this weekend at the age of 88. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!, “Breaking with Convention.”