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Television talk show pioneer Phil Donahue, who died Sunday at age 88, would always remember the day that “the whole city of Dayton came to a halt.”
It was 1968, and WLWD’s The Phil Donahue Show was only a year old. How could an upstart talk show on a local NBC affiliate manage to interrupt the life of a whole city?
By having an openly gay guest on the show.
At the time, the federal government still equated homosexuality with communism, and the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a mental illness. In many states, same-sex activity was a felony. Though the calls that came into Donahue’s show were vitriolic, the genial, even-tempered host kept the tone civil and the dialogue open.
“In an hour exchange, the guy came out sounding like a human being,” Donahue told Studs Terkel in 1980. The audience, he continued, began to realize that “maybe we had burdened ourselves unnecessarily with fears of these folks simply because we’ve never had a chance to chat with them.”
In his show’s three-decade run, Donahue would host close to 7,000 such chats, turning unmentionable topics into discussable ones and, just maybe, broadening the minds of those watching. (At the show’s peak, there were 8 million of them.) In the process, Donahue changed media and programming itself, prefiguring the character of online content before there was even an internet.
Below are five of the lessons that Phil Donahue has taught us:
Ordinary people can be great content
During commercial breaks, Donahue immediately saw that members of his audience had pertinent questions to ask—some more probing than his own—which sent him up the aisles with a microphone. Though The Phil Donahue Show (later shortened to just Donahue) moved to New York in the mid-1980s, the host took his show on the road—everywhere from Salt Lake City to the Soviet Union—to make sure that audience participation remained a democratizing and colorful part of the mix.
Underestimate women at your peril
Since midmorning airtime was always a key element of Donahue’s show, as much as 90% of his viewership was female—often wives who didn’t work. (Roughly half of American women were stay-at-home mothers in 1967.) Donahue refused to typify or talk down to them.