With a confrontational chat format that predated Oprah and Jerry Springer, Phil Donahue changed TV forever.
From race relations to male strippers and child sex abuse, Donahue tackled it all and made once-taboo topics on TV became business as usual. “I took a lot of heat,” DonahueBut Donahue wouldn’t have been an obvious pick for ‘Most Likely To Disrupt The Television Industry.
After he gained popularity for his sit downs with guests like then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Noam Chomsky, Muhammad Ali and more, he became a staple voice, garnering plenty of fans willing to follow him to TV—but more would be needed to keep the interest. “We started locally in Dayton with two cameras and no stars—we could only afford to fly in two guests a week,” hein 2002, “We knew we were visually dull, so we had to go to issues—that’s what made us alive.
Everyone who was anyone needed to be on the Donahue show. In 1992 it was then Democratic candidate Bill Clinton and his running mate Al Gore who were guests.The local show in Dayton then became so popular that it was picked up by several other stations in the midwest before it was moved to Chicago and renamedin 1974.
Stars and those who wanted to be stars knew it was the show to be on—among them, in 1987, Donald Trump, pushing his book, which promoted former President Richard Nixon to write to the property scion, saying that his wife Pat had watched the show and that Trump was “great.”, which he devoted a whole segment to in 1988—one of the first times the issue had been discussed on television.
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