5 Lessons the Media Learned From the King of Daytime Talk Phil Donahue

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.

“The average housewife is bright and inquisitive, but television treats her like some mental midget,” he wrote in his 1979 book Donahue: My Own Story.

Be fearless

While much of TV avoided contentious topics, Donahue put them on the air. The show took on the AIDS crisis and the American prison system, also televising both a child’s birth and an abortion procedure. Donahue’s first guest was famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who had just filed a lawsuit to halt prayer in public schools.

“We couldn’t be ponderous—we had to enter screaming,” Donahue later told Oprah Winfrey in an interview. “On the show with Madalyn, we burned the town down immediately—kaboom!”

A shoestring budget has its advantages

While Donahue’s format would be praised as groundbreaking, most of it wasn’t planned. Since Dayton was a media backwater, Donahue—with few resources and little supervision—was free to experiment. He nixed the Johnny Carson-esque trappings of a live band and an opening monologue and instead devoted his full hour to one topic.

“The show’s style had developed not by genius but by necessity,” Donahue recalled in his memoir. “The familiar talk-show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. … The result was improvisation.”

Today’s influencers pave the way for tomorrow’s stars

Donahue’s popularity would establish and enshrine daytime talk as an American institution, setting the stage for a new generation of hosts, including Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Piers Morgan, and Oprah Winfrey, whose media empire is worth an estimated $2.5 billion.

“There wouldn’t have been an Oprah Show without Phil Donahue being the first to prove that daytime talk and women watching should be taken seriously,” Winfrey posted on Instagram today. “He was a pioneer. I’m glad I got to thank him for it.”