Phil Donahue: 1935-2024

Talk Show Host Personified a More Thoughtful, Dignified Culture

Phil Donahue died on Sunday at the age of eighty-eight.

He is now remembered for “revolutionizing” daytime television, but it had been some time since he dominated airwaves. As culture became cruder, more sensational, more fatuous, and melodramatic, his engaging, substantive, even intellectual style was eclipsed. I remember asking people why he disappeared from television after seeing him constantly as a boy in the 1980s. They said the likes of Jerry Springer and Morton Downey, Junior were dominating the Nielsen ratings by then, marginalizing the more incisive, relevant Donahue.

But before there was little on the air worth watching other than Mike Judge’s satires of the culture of Springer and Downey, Donahue was a significant personality who respectfully engaged with notable, even controversial, thinkers, even those with whom he disagreed. Highlights of his career included two interviews with Ayn Rand in 1979 and 1980. He also welcomed less consistent but outspoken free market economist Milton Friedman. The left-leaning Donahue helped spread better ideas—the antidote to the unreason and statism destroying the culture and the world—at a time when it was still possible to disseminate better ideas via mass media.

Donahue was also briefly interviewed in the fascinating 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier. The talk show host employed the subject, a professional quality amateur photographer, hiring her as a housekeeper.

Donahue was long ago eclipsed by the culture of puerile, infantile trash. Perhaps his qualities will inspire a new kind of interviewer in a better future.