‘Donahue’ Show on Brawley Case: Plenty of Heat

“It was a screamer,” talk show star Phil Donahue said Thursday of the previous day’s show, which aired live from a Brooklyn church and was filled with accusations of racism and cover-up attempts by state officials.

“But I thought this audience was very mindful of the fact that the more they applauded, the less time people had to make their points. It was never an audience out of control,” he said.

Wednesday’s “Donahue” concerned the case of Tawana Brawley, 16, a black girl from Wappinger Falls, N.Y., who last November claimed she had been kidnaped and raped by six white men, including one with a badge.

Arranged on a day’s notice, the show was billed as an interview with the girl’s mother, Glenda, who for a week has taken refuge in Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church to avoid a 30-day contempt-of-court jail sentence for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating the case.

With her for the broadcast were her chief advisers, the Rev. Al Sharpton and attorneys C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox.

Although the mother stood by her daughter’s story, the advisers did most of the talking, much of it denunciations of New York’s justice system as racist. They offered little in the way of specific evidence in the Brawley case, despite Donahue’s oft-interrupted efforts to bring that out.

Although New Yorkers saw the frequently raucous interview session live on WNBC-TV, it didn’t appear in Southern California until Thursday on KNBC-TV Channel 4 in Burbank. A spokesman for the show explained that only a few of the 216 stations carrying the series air it live. The majority, including KNBC, air each show on a one-day delayed basis.

The audience in the church where Wednesday’s show originated was predominantly black, many in it clearly Brawley supporters. But there also were about 100 other persons, some tourists from out of town. They had shown up at NBC studios in mid-town Manhattan, where Donahue’s show normally is done, and were bused to the church.

Donahue said Lillian Smith, a producer on his show, had worked since last November to arrange the interview. There were no restrictions placed on what he could ask, he said.

While several newspaper reviews of Wednesday’s session generally were mild, saying the interviews produced more heat than light, one review in New York Newsday, while calling the program “useful,” nonetheless sharply faulted it.

Referring to Mrs. Brawley’s advisers, critic David Friedman wrote that “Smith, Donahue--and all the viewers at home--had been had by three of the most shameless media manipulators the TV age has ever seen.”

When interviewed on Thursday, Donahue, referring generally to accusations of media manipulation, called such assertions “another way of saying, ‘I don’t agree with these people, get ‘em off the air.’ ”

“My view,” he said, “is this: ‘Relax. You’d be amazed how much common sense there is out there (in the audience).’

“I think our job as media is to provide the information and let the people who make statements on talk shows or to newspapers rise or fall of their own weight,” he said. “I think the people have enough common sense to make their own judgment about what they see.”