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CounterPunch
March 4,
2003
Somebody Blew Up Donahue!
Dead Man Walking
By ANTHONY GANCARSKI
Finally, Matt Drudge can stop plastering his webpage
with Phil Donahue's casket photo (the one where his eyes are
glazed like Krispy Kremes, his face gray as snow piles in a gutter).
MSNBC has been announcing a programming change every hour or
so. This may be the most memorable schedule adjustment since
the last rites of Alan Keyes, and the frequent announcements
seem intended to make you aware that a certain party -- indeed,
a certain way of doing business -- has passed from this realm.
Phil Donahue isn't dead as of this writing.
But his show is. And now voices that stayed silent during his
show's somnambulant six month run are making themselves heard.
Recently, the NATION's John Nichols and Ralph
Nader have both asserted that Donahue's show failed because
he wasn't allowed to be Donahue. Phil was undercut by the man,
and helpless to say anything about this situation during his
time on MSNBC, even as DRUDGE ran leaked memos weekly attesting
that Phil's show was a dead issue.
A dead issue, indeed. Donahue's show
was stillborn from the start, a fact tacitly acknowledged by
Nichols and Nader both. Throughout his NATION piece, Nichols
refers to such phenomena as "constant pressure to clog his
show's arteries with deadly dull apologists for all things Bush"
and other ways in which MSNBC thwarted Donahue's quest to "enter
the cable wars as a pox-on-all-their-houses lefty who would open
his show up to a freewheeling dialogue about war and peace, corruption
and cronyism, Republican wrongheadedness and Democratic disappointments."
Nader, for his part, thinks the show might have drawn better
numbers if MSNBC "promotional budgets would have gone for
reaching liberal audiences of the kind who read Utne magazine,
Mother Jones, or who watch various PBS outlets and other serious
programming."
Certainly, one can speculate that the
show might have drawn better if MSNBC had pimped it during NOVA,
or if they had taken out full-page ads in MOTHER JONES, IN THESE
TIMES, et al. But if there was really such market demand for
Phil Donahue, the show would've drawn without such inducements.
The readers of such sophisticated journals are quite aware of
Donahue's existence.
As were the people watching on cable
nationwide, even if Ralph Nader goes out of his way to avoid
that fact. Nader goes so far as to link the show's lack of market
penetration with MSNBC not being in TV programming listings "in
about half the country." Hold on, Mr. President! For starters,
how do you prove a claim like that? Did Nader really survey every
paper with television listings nationwide?
I would expect that he didn't. It would
be nice if DONAHUE tanked simply because the suits at MSNBC were
too busy playing Dungeons & Dragons to ensure their shows
got ink in every smalltown paper's TV Guide. Or that the show
really was a thriving success, but that Donahue was undercut
by an internal NBC report decrying him as "a tired, left-wing
liberal out of touch with the current marketplace . . . a difficult
public face for NBC in a time of war."
Whether Donahue's was a difficult face
for NBC to feature during "wartime" or not is an entirely
debatable issue. What is less debatable, however, is what the
MSNBC DONAHUE show actually was like to watch.
The program was utter torture. Too often,
Phil seemed two questions behind his guests. Too often, he seemed
to retreat into the cliches so typical of "fighting liberals",
who seem to prefer the spotlight and the company of celebrities
to drawing lines in the sand.
Because lines definitely should've been
drawn. If DONAHUE had led off with HITCHENS V CHOMSKY on its
first night, it would've beaten out O'REILLY on the sheer strength
of that matchup's pyrotechnics. Likewise, I'm certain TAKI V
BILL KRISTOL would've done a hell of a lot better than IN THE
KITCHEN WITH FRANK GAFFNEY and EARCLEANING WITH ROSIE O'DONNELL,
TV'S "QUEEN OF NICE." The show should've been booked
like the WWE, playing up the legitimate and very real schisms
among intellectuals, bringing viewers fiery debate five nights
a week. Instead, we got slop that often was unfit for Public
Access cable.
But what do I know? I only watched the
show off and on for about six months. I only watched Donahue
stumble through his questions with a couple hundred guests. I
only saw a man that looked ready for bed when he was supposed
to be defending western civilization from the dogs of war. You
could see it from the start, if you watched the show. Even before
Labor Day, Phil Donahue was a dead man walking.
ANTHONY GANCARSKI is CounterPunch's King of Nice. He welcomes
comments at: ANTHONY.GANCARSKI@ATTBI.COM
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February 28,
2003
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Saul Landau
Now
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A Plea for Hysteria
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