Talk Show Host Phil Donahue Dies At 88

Talk show host Phil Donahue, who championed various leftist perspectives on his eponymous TV show and changed the industry by interacting with his studio audience, has died at the age of 88.

Donahue’s second wife, former actress Marlo Thomas, to whom he was married for 44 years, was with him and Donahue’s children and grandchildren when he died at his home on Sunday night.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Donahue graduated from Notre Dame before starting his broadcasting career, first at KYW-AM TV, then WABJ in Michigan as program/news director, then at WHIO-AM-TV in Dayton as a reporter. In the late 1960s, he hosted a morning interview program on WLWD TV in Dayton, where his first guest was famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“Soon Donahue was tackling controversial subjects like premarital sex and homosexuality as well as other social, political and lifestyle issues,” Variety noted.

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In 1974, his show moved to WGN-TV and was renamed “Donahue.” Newsweek wrote, “One sometimes suspects that Donahue’s idea of the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who have had a child by artificial insemination.”

“And in fact, such a couple appeared on the show in 1979,” Variety pointed out. But the door Donahue had opened for salacious topics prompted other shows to go even further. By 1996, Donahue called it quits as his audience had dwindled, not only because other shows were pushing the envelope further but because his primarily female audience had drifted off to competing hosts such as Oprah Winfrey.

“No apologies–not for cutting deals to get ‘hot’ guests on the air before anyone else, nor for putting tossed dwarfs and roller games queens and transvestites on the air during the after-school viewing hours, nor for airing panel discussions on such topics as ‘catching your mate in bed with someone else,’” The Los Angeles Times wrote of Donahue in 1990.

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“Come on. Let’s get rid of the pretense and understand that we’ve got an unholy alliance between the media, which is focused on ratings and circulation, and a community of people that it serves in the marketplace who are focused on Madonna, Jim and Tammy Faye and Zsa Zsa!” Donahue snapped.

Donahue mocked journalists who did not attack President Ronald Reagan, taunting, “Ronald Reagan, he’s our man, he can fight the Commies if anybody can.” In 2013, Donahue joined a protest at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.