Once upon a time, there was a man who had a great idea for an afternoon talk show on television. That was 23 years ago. But then America changed and TV changed. So Phil Donahue had to change too. : Donahue’s Dilemma: Balancing Truth, Trash

The system often breeds an attitude that focuses on competition, not comprehension. It also breeds insensitivity.

--Phil Donahue from “Donahue: My Own Story,” 1979

Mr. Sensitive gets testy when people quiz him about dwarf-tossing.

“ I didn’t toss the dwarfs,” protested Phil Donahue, the 54-year-old prince of the afternoon TV talk show circuit. “Someone else did it and demonstrated that it’s being done actually as a commercial activity. I don’t apologize for a moment that I exposed this activity on my program. It’s important.”

A close examination revealed no tongue in either of Donahue’s cheeks. He focused his aqua eyes on his interrogator like lasers, then leaned forward with both elbows planted squarely on the edge of his desk.

“Who are we? What shall we tolerate?” Donahue shouted with magnificent outrage, slapping his open palm on top of the desk.

Sitting in his 8th-floor office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, he thrust his chin out like an Irish boxer who dares any man in the room to take a poke at him. “And what . . ., “ he said, laying in a dramatic pause in his list of reasons for doing the show, “does the dwarf have to say?”

What Donahue said about “the little people” on an October taping of his hour-long daily exercise in sociopolitical discourse was obviously dead serious stuff to him. The program was entitled “What We’ll Do for Entertainment,” and it revolved around the recently imported Australian tavern practice of shot-putting dwarfs for sport, usually after both thrower and/or throwee have imbibed a tankard or two of ale. People will apparently do, or watch, most anything for entertainment . . . a prospect that puts Phil Donahue smack dab in the middle of an integrity tug of war of national proportions these days.

On the one hand, his credibility as a newsman-turned-talk-show-host has been painstakingly erected over two decades, based on his willingness to tackle serious national issues, ranging from war to starvation to abortion to AIDS. On the other, Donahue knows he must flashdance with the best of them or risk losing his ratings and, ultimately, his show.

There was a time not so many years ago when Donahue used to build a whole hour around give-and-take discussions with a single congressman about a single issue of national importance. Now, he says with a resigned candor, the only congressional representative he could build a show around would be Barney Frank, the gay Democrat from Massachusetts.

Donahue is schizophrenic on the subject of trash TV. He regrets the recent turn to tabloidism, but remains optimistic enough about its possibilities to get down into the transvestite trenches with the likes of both Geraldo and Oprah. He has taken plenty of shots for his decision. Last year, a panel of TV critics zeroed in on him in a general skewering of the sorry state of television talk shows. The panel, whose criticisms were subsequently aired as a special on PBS, was particularly hard on Donahue because he was once viewed as the sage of the talk show circuit: a beacon of intelligence in the often tawdry world of afternoon soap opera and game shows.

Donahue admits to some low-road programming in recent years, chiefly to “draw a crowd” and stay on the air. But he puts some of the blame on the audience. If America hadn’t slipped into an MTV coma, intent on entertaining rather than informing itself, “Donahue” might continue to host members of Congress instead of members of the circus, he believes.

For the past 23 years, everyone from Jimmy Hoffa to George Bush to Pete Rose has been on “Donahue,” spilling their guts to the fast-talking host, to his mostly female in-studio audience and, ultimately, to the nation. Some 200 TV stations continue to carry the oldest of the current daily syndicated talk shows, and Donahue has a contract with Multimedia Productions to keep up the pace at least through 1992.

But something has changed in the past few years.

The man who started his talk-show odyssey back in Dayton, Ohio in 1967 is loath to admit it, but the competitive onslaught of tabloid TV has taken its toll on both his program’s content and how it promotes itself, and on Donahue personally.

Until four years ago, Donahue had the afternoon crowd all to himself. He didn’t even have to use his last name. Everybody knew who Phil was. He had married Marlo Thomas in 1980, had been a regular contributor to the “Today” show, had hosted prime-time specials, had written his autobiography.

Then came Oprah Winfrey in 1986, followed by Geraldo Rivera a year later. Sally Jessy Raphael jumped from radio to afternoon TV in 1988 and Joan Rivers entered the sweepstakes last fall. Donahue is still in the race, but he no longer leads the pack. In its annual ranking of the most-watched syndicated TV programs, A.C. Nielsen put “Donahue” in 10th place last summer with a 6 rating. “Geraldo” was in 9th place with a 6.1 rating and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” came in 5th with an 8.6 rating. (The top two syndicated shows remain “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy!”)

Donahue puts the best face on what he has been forced to do to keep up his ratings, but if he talks long enough about it, it becomes plain that he doesn’t especially like it.

“If you don’t understand how we survive in TV, no argument I make is going to make a difference,” he said. “We get paid to draw a crowd. When we don’t draw a crowd, we don’t get paid.”

With a shock of brunette hair in those early Ohio days, he looked more like a Charles Grodin than a Steve Martin. But time and fame have changed that. The haircut may still be boyish and the wide-eyed mannerisms still endearing, but the hair itself is nearly white.

“I’m at a very good part of my life,” he said. “I’m very happy. I’m probably not the jack-in-the-box I once was, but I’ve got lots of energy. I’m very blessed.”

He knocked on the wood-grained Formica of his desktop and lay back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head in a show of just how relaxed he really is these days.

That attitude seems to extend to the rash of talk shows that have risen up to challenge him in recent years. “Everybody with a hammer and nails is building a talk show set these days,” said Donahue, who tries to take the high road in addressing the competition. Keeps him on his toes, he says. Makes him more keenly competitive, he says. Gives the audience a wider variety of programming from which to choose, he says.

Yet there is something of a downside to the rash of new shows too, and it ties in with the tossing of dwarfs for fun and profit or borrowing a dress from one of his producers and showing up on camera looking like the late Divine. Though he maintains that he has always billed himself first and foremost as an entertainer, Donahue got his broadcasting start as a newsman . . . and therein lies the Donahue dilemma.

“I used to stay up all night editing shows. Documentaries,” he recalled wistfully during his laid-back pose in a recent interview. “I used to wait until 3 or 4 in the morning, until Jimmy Hoffa came out of his hotel room, so I could get an ambush interview.

“I didn’t realize it then, but as I look back now, I worked two or three times harder than a lot of the people around me. I used to have cameramen when I was doing local news who, after three or four hours on a story, wanted to go home. I wanted them to wait another hour and they would have some suggestions as to what I could do with the camera.”

Phillip John Donahue, the only son of a staunchly Irish Catholic middle-class Cleveland couple, maintains that he is not a journalist--at least, not in the traditional sense. His degree from the University of Notre Dame is in marketing, after all, not journalism and, like his successful furniture-salesman father, he has learned how to turn his pugnacious gift for blarney into dollars and cents through razzle-dazzle huckstering.

But the fact that he and his peers are not journalists in the traditional sense does not mean that they cannot contribute to “this pool of information, in the middle of which might be found the legacy or vestige of the truth,” he said.

“Nobody needs to take a test to be a journalist,” he said. “Nobody needs to have a college degree. Nobody needs to appear before a board. Nobody needs to give a urine analysis. Nobody has to do anything. Everybody can be a journalist, including moi .”

And yet his roots are in the traditional journalism that he characteristically condemns, particularly as practiced by the Washington press corps. He is quick to criticize the faint of heart who let Ronald Reagan get away with eight years of obsequious half-truths and he musters up his trademark bluster over the failure of the nation’s newshounds to uncover Iran-Contragate, the HUD scandal or the savings and loan crisis.

“I think they pandered in their own way to what their readers wanted,” he said, contemptuously adding in a sing-song tone of voice: “Ronald Reagan, he’s our man, he can fight the Commies if anybody can.”

Donahue is an admitted C-SPAN junkie, rarely misses “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and regularly reads the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. At 54, he wants to pursue the truth as passionately and as tirelessly as he did at 24. But he also wants to stay on the air so that he can pursue the truth before several million viewers each afternoon. In order to do so, he has to walk a fine line between imitating Edward R. Murrow and P.T. Barnum. The balancing act is becoming more precarious with each passing sweeps rating period.

“Here’s the worst thing they say. You ready?” Donahue asked.

He sat at a table in the drafty New York studios of NBC across from Tammy Faye Bakker, just days before her husband was to be sentenced to 50 years in federal prison for fraud and tax evasion.

“I’m ready, Phil,” answered Tammy Faye.

“You lost your soul,” Phil said in a hushed voice. “You almost did.”

“Well. . . .”

“I mean, isn’t that possible?” he persisted.

“I’m not saying it’s not possible,” she answered, “but I never forgot--and I’ll say this before God--I never forgot my background. I never forgot where I came from. . . . Every time I get in a bathtub full of bubbles I say ‘thank you God’ that I can take a bubble bath. And I mean that. I never forgot that it was God that put me there.”

A few days before, Donahue sat in the same studio with Zsa Zsa Gabor, leading her through a reliving of the trauma of being pulled over in her Rolls-Royce by a Beverly Hills cop. The audience learned that the cop bore a resemblance to Tom Selleck and that he secretly wanted to sleep with Zsa Zsa. Then, as Donahue put it, again in his dramatic hushed voice, he asked her what he called “the killer question”:

“I read this in Parade magazine. They say you’re 70,” he said.

“That is full of bull,” said Zsa Zsa as the camera pulled in tight for a close-up of her crow’s feet.

And the in-studio audience roared.

Out in America they roared too, judging by the Nielsen overnights. The Zsa Zsa and Tammy Faye shows were among the most popular “Donahue” programs in months.

But when he had former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon on last October, he attracted only 1% of the available viewers--a fraction of his usual audience. Similarly, when relatives of the 27 victims of the USS Stark were on his show, thousands of dials all over America switched to another channel.

“I better not have Ariel Sharon or a variation on the theme thereof too often or the only job available to me may be self-appointed high-priest hopscotching around the country scolding journalists for not telling people what they ought to know,” he said. “I’m not that messianic.”

He wishes more people would watch when he has guests like Sharon on, but the very fact that he has at least some portion of the nation tuned in helps justify the big-draw programs on Zsa Zsa, adultery and dwarf-tossing.

Still, Donahue maintains that he has not lowered his standards just to bring in an audience. He has always had to balance between the profound and profane. He wore a dress on his program years ago, but didn’t get the sort of press he did when he wore one again in November, 1988. He brags about being the first to bring male strippers to afternoon TV in the early ‘70s.

But if any of the quasi-news programs that have cropped up in recent years have appeared to grow more lurid, shallow or titillating, the blame has to be shared by the viewers, he says.

“Here’s my point: We’re being asked to give them the news,” he said in defense of television in general. “We are asked to be a BBC media and part of our job is to attract an MTV audience. I don’t want to be a dead hero. So, you know, I can’t walk all over the face of a local news director who covers a bloody accident with more film than he covers a meeting between (Yitzhak) Shamir and (Shimon) Peres. I get it! I didn’t last 23 years at this without slowly evolving into a recognition of what’s going on here.”

What’s going on, as Donahue describes it, is a culture in decay. To illustrate his point, he falls back on a frequently told story about his first visit to the Soviet Union with 300 Muscovites a couple of years back. He asked them where they would like to visit if they could come to America and the first person he spoke to told him Las Vegas. A second respondent named Oxford, Miss., as her choice because that was the birthplace of William Faulkner.

“They read,” Donahue said. “They’re more familiar with Mark Twain. They seem to have had less information over the past 70 years to be sure, but they may have more knowledge. They’re fascinated by this country. They’re curious about homeless people and naked ladies on 42nd Street. But they’re also fascinated by the wealth. They want to know about the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. They want to know about Southern California, the entertainment industry. Fascinating.”

Donahue delivers one of his patented pregnant pauses, then urgently whispers:

“What’s the comparable fascination with the Soviet Union on the part of the American citizen?”

That having been said, however, business is business.

There was a time not so many years ago when people like Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam called “Donahue” a televised “Ph.D. course” and humorist Art Buchwald showed up with regularity to discuss his latest book.

Nowadays, Halberstam says that “Donahue” has “lost its soul” and Buchwald claims he can’t get an invitation to come on the show unless he gets a sex-change operation.

Donahue’s answer is that times change. He used to have authors on as regularly as Larry King does on his radio show. He asked Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) and Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) on as little as three or four years ago. He probably wouldn’t have them on today. Times change and so do topics of discussion.

“Last week, Peter Jennings did a piece on date rape,” Donahue said. “ ‘NBC Nightly News’ did a thing on excessively vulnerable wives. If we did this on daytime, it would be called trash TV.”

Last spring, Donahue participated in a televised panel discussion about tabloid TV talk shows and journalism. Entitled “Entertainment News or Entertainment?” the Columbia University-sponsored discussion, featuring Donahue and 10 other well-known talk show hosts and/or journalists, quickly became an indictment of “trash TV.”

Donahue in particular took his lumps. Unlike his Johnny-come-lately competitors, he once epitomized the essence of afternoon blue-ribbon programming with his razor-sharp, no-nonsense probing of Watergate figures, foreign dignitaries and Love Canal environmental malefactors during the 1970s.

To demonstrate the contrast, the panelists--who ranged from Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales and syndicated radio host Larry King to Geraldo Rivera and Morton Downey Jr.--were treated to a more recent film clip of Donahue in a red dress and hose during the ratings sweeps period in November, 1988.

Donahue offered no apologies. He made his choice to stick with the syndicated program rather than strike out for a job in network news and defends it. There is more editorial freedom in the kind of syndicated show that he produces five days a week than there is in network news, even if he does have to pander a bit on occasion. Besides, he is paid better than any comparable network news star, which is one of the chief reasons he has sidestepped overtures to move to network TV. He also answers to no “network vice president who wakes up Tuesday morning and decides while he’s shaving that he doesn’t like you and doesn’t want you around anymore.”

Donahue’s attempts to boost ratings is no worse than a newspaper’s attempts to boost circulation, he said. In fact, doing a daily talk show is comparable to writing a daily newspaper story, he added. The flaws, mistakes and poor judgment calls that sometimes characterize a story written under deadline pressure also happen in a daily talk show produced under deadline pressure.

The brand of journalism that Donahue and his fellow talk show hosts practice adds a healthy diversity to the national information pool, he argued.

Since the Tabloid TV panel discussion last spring, he has gone even further in defending himself and his fellow purveyors of this new kind of journalism. Programs such as “Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair” and “Inside Edition” will join Donahue, Geraldo and Oprah in breaking new ground, he predicted.

“There’s information in these programs,” he said. “A lot of these lofty critics, breathless with indignation, railing at the television world going to hell . . . their criticism lacks precision. They rail against the titillation and sensationalism, in my opinion, without reviewing all the content of these programs.”

If such programs fail in the ratings, they are likely to be replaced by more game shows, more soap operas and more reruns--a prospect that will lead to less information being fed to the American public. Even if it is couched in tabloid terminology, it is information and some of it is helpful, educational, even revealing in more than simply the decolletage sense, according to Donahue.

“These programs perform a service. They may be the last best hope when the cops arrest your sister. It’s a cinch the networks aren’t going to try to get your sister out of jail,” Donahue said. “I’m not guaranteeing it, but I’m saying it’s possible, and if we join the chorus of critics, we make the producers of these shows more timid. They start to catch Reaganitis like the so-called ‘straight’ press. They start jumping on the bandwagon instead of covering it.”

No apologies--not for cutting deals to get “hot” guests on the air before anyone else, nor for putting tossed dwarfs and roller games queens and transvestites on the air during the after-school viewing hours, nor for airing panel discussions on such topics as “catching your mate in bed with someone else.”

“Come on,” Donahue said in disgust. “Let’s get rid of the pretense and understand that we’ve got an unholy alliance between the media, which is focused on ratings and circulation, and a community of people that it serves in the marketplace who are focused on Madonna, Jim and Tammy Faye and Zsa Zsa!”

Two weeks ago, Donahue had a stinging panel discussion with the White House correspondents from all three major networks and CNN, blasting the Bush Administration’s invasion of Panama. It was thought-provoking enough to warrant a call from Presidential Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, requesting a tape of the show for the President’s personal viewing. It is a program of which Donahue is very proud.

A few days later, he did an hour on the sensational Stuart murder case in Boston, in which a husband allegedly murdered his pregnant wife for the insurance money.

The Stuart show beat the White House correspondents in the ratings in virtually every market where “Donahue” airs. A quick glance at any magazine stand in the country will explain why, the host suggests.

“It’s evident in any perfunctory review of the covers of Time and Newsweek, which are increasingly looking more and more like People magazine! I don’t condemn them for this. There’s no sense in writing if nobody’s reading. There’s no sense in talking if nobody’s listening.”

When his current contract is over 2 1/2 years from now, Donahue is seriously thinking about getting out of the talk show business and hosting, instead, thoughtful documentaries in the vein of “The Human Animal” series that he produced for NBC several years ago.

“We carried our time period five straight nights,” he said. “It was expensive and it took three years to put together. It was a lot of work, but it was a lot of reward too. I think I’d like that kind of challenge: something that is the opposite of daily deadlines.”

But he likes the Adrenalin and the adulation of having his name and face out there every day too. It won’t be easy to abandon. He will be 56 years old and will have been talking to TV audiences for one quarter of a century when his contract expires. He might run for public office if winning looks realistic, he says.

“I’m not certain my politics are electable right now,” he said. “The ‘80s have not been my decade.”

But he doesn’t like the idea of having to beat the bushes for campaign money, and questions whether he is dedicated enough to go to Washington.

“I once sat in the gallery with some senators and asked them: How many nights a week are you working? And they told me a minimum of four nights. Well, I want to come home and read the paper at night,” he said.