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FIRED BY MSNBC FOR GIVING VOICE TO IRAQ WAR OPPOSITION, PHIL DONAHUE
(1935–2024) WAS COURAGE PERSONIFIED  
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Jeff Cohen
August 19, 2024
The Conversation
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_ The journalist and TV show host, who died Sunday at the age of 88,
made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it
with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my
life and the lives of so many others. _

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Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was
beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.

He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing
social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host,
and then he was pretty-much banished from TV by MSNBC because
he—accurately, correctly, and morally—questioned the horrific U.S.
invasion of Iraq.

In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to
millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in
syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests
on his daytime show were Ralph Nader
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Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted
civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly
hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry
and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for
atheism.

Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes
that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was
serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV
journalists to address the biggest issues.

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show
in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the
men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were
intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by
NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington
before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed.
Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo
said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a
time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were
not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara
Ehrenreich on Labor Day in 2002; a full hour with veteran journalist
Studs Terkel; interviews with progressive members of Congress,
including Bernie Sanders
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Kucinich; and segments with the "maverick" _Texas
Observer_ columnist Molly Ivins; and offered platforms to foreign
policy experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders as well as
Palestinian advocates, including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on American television cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil
did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres,
and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed
stunned—never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and
actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had
booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were
pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right.
When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the
pending Iraq war—she was told she’d need to book three
rightwingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest
antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely
covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.

Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy
media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch
group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)

Phil put Noam Chomsky
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He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential
debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him
to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare
that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other
countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet
Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary
on the topic: “Body of War,
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life and death of Tomas Young.

Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog.
He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He
changed my life. And others’ lives.

He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the
feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass
scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of
it.

_Jeff Cohen is an activist and author. Cohen was an associate
professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for
Independent Media at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group
FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. In
2002, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the author of
"Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media" - and a
co-founder of the online action group, www.RootsAction.org
[[link removed]]. His website is jeffcohen.org._

_The Conversation is a nonprofit, independent news organization
dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good.
Get fact-based journalism written by experts in your inbox each
morning with  a Conversation newsletter
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* Phil Donahue
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* Journalism
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* Iraq War
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* NBC
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* MSNBC
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