[-V-]

Phil Donahue is credited with inventing the talk show platform in the late 1960s and he ran with it for over 20 years (for which he received 19 emmies), but what I give him the most credit for is pushing a wave of progressive thinking into daytime television otherwise dominated by soup operas and game shows.

Phil wasn't afraid to stick the microphone in anyone's face, onstage or in the audience, and challenge their ideas on sensitive issues like racial and gender equality and sexuality long before there was a show called Archie Bunker (and most of your neighbors were Archie Bunker).

In 2002 he returned to talk TV as one of the lone liberal voices on cable news but the show was cut down soon after the Iraq war began because the network felt American's would not respond to anything but good old fashion flag waving and administration butt licking.

[MAGI]

I loved Phil Donohue's cable news shows. How he tried to keep us out of Iraq!

Talk about fair and balanced..............His show was ALL That!
He provided both sides of the issues he presented. It was on his show that I came to know Scott Ritter (on the team of UN inspectors in Iraq early on) and learned there were likely, no WMDs in Iraq.[/B]

I will always believe MSNBC cancelled him because he was so against invading Iraq. He had excellent guests on that show. Donahue IS an honest man and let his guests say their piece completely........So unlike FOX cable news.......

I tried to play Cat's Meow game of picking republicans to fill the slate and finally thought I'd rather come up with a slate of people I'd love in those positions. Phil Donahue was on that list.

Sadly, We The People lost again.

[-V-]

The spin for the cancellation was that the show couldn't attract advertisers or ratings but as The New York Times reported, when Donahue's MSNBC show, Donahue, was cancelled, "he was actually attracting more viewers than any other show on MSNBC."

Donahue said in a Fox News interview, "Well, we were the only antiwar voice that had a show, and that, I think, made them very nervous. I mean, from the top down, they were just terrified. We had to have two conservatives on for every liberal. I was counted as two liberals."

They replaced Phil with shows by Michael Savage (a nasty right-wing radio host) and later Joe Scarborough (former GOP congressman). Apparently, MSNBC felt that if they couldn't beat Fox News they would join them.

[cat's meow]

Yep, that is the lament of media since the starting of the war and Phil is another 'casualty of war.' The Geoff Nunberg book talks about this, the war of words. You see that Ted Kopell's old format has been changed too, nothing in depth any longer since he left. I get real tired of, "if you knew, then why did you not report it?" This has been one of the most controlling and mud throwing administrations in many years. Jane Mayer was talking on NPR the other day and how it is the most difficult set of people she has dealt with in the four presidents she has covered (since Reagan). She works the Whitehouse for NPR. She said the New Yorker expose she did on Addington was like pulling teeth; she had never been up against so much resistance.

[-V-]

You see that Ted Kopell's old format has been changed too

I used to say believe I couldn't be sure I heard the truth behind an issue until I saw Ted Kopell cover it on Nightline. I stop watching it not long after Bush took office because the show and Ted started losing their edge.