Donahue’s Back, With No Plans to Be Neutral

His voice rising to a near-shout, his hands in the air over his head, Phil Donahue seems ready to burst out of the tiny, standard-issue interior office adjacent to one of the no-frills MSNBC cubicle warrens here.

He’s on a tear, passionately railing against the possibility of the U.S. killing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and, more broadly, what he says are attacks in this country on the U.S. way of life as safeguarded by the Bill of Rights: attempts to “squelch dissent,” the invasions of privacy, the limits on “the right to meet our accusers.” And there’s no TV camera in sight.

The office, which he uses as his base when working from MSNBC, contains no visible stacks of files, but there’s a hairbrush, canisters of pretzels and peanuts and a box of crackers. It leaves the impression that the preparation for his new MSNBC show--which makes its debut Monday (airing at 5 and 8 p.m. Pacific time), a centerpiece in the cable channel’s latest attempt to remake itself, this time in a more opinionated mode--is all in his head, in the litany of issues he is itching to debate.

Donahue, 66, was a pioneer in daytime talk before ratings pressure drove the format into an increasingly tawdry phase. With his ratings declining precipitously, he quit in 1996. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 made him want to come back, he said, particularly because he perceived pressure to limit dissenting opinions on such issues as the bombing of Afghanistan. But after his time working on Ralph Nader’s losing Green Party presidential campaign, “I had no idea how employable I was or not. Nader’s not exactly a launching pad for television personalities.”

MSNBC, trying to create some buzz and get out of third place among cable news channels, answered that question. Though Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC all have programs facing off conservative and liberal commentators, Donahue will be one of the few left-of-center voices with his own daily platform, in a television talk landscape increasingly dominated by conservatives. “We think the audience will be receptive to views not seen that often today,” he said.

Although many conservatives have been quick to decry a liberal bias in network news and the media in general, there are almost no true liberals hosting TV talk shows, said Alex Jones, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, and he’s waiting to see what Donahue has to say before putting him in that camp.

“Conservatives have been very successful at defining ‘liberal’ as anything that is not conservative; they have redefined the center,” said Jones, defining a true liberal as someone like Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, who considers the New York Times “a really reactionary tool of the government.... I don’t think Donahue is anything like Chomsky.”

Donahue is quick to agree that the left has moved toward the center. “[Former President] Bill Clinton is 12 noon!” he exclaimed, adding that he himself is “left of Bill Clinton.” He rattles off his stance on various issues to prove it, expressing support for single-payer health plans, public financing of campaigns, enhancing the opportunity to form unions. “I don’t think one company should own 1,200 radio stations,” he said, in a reference to Clear Channel Communications, “[and] I don’t think we should execute retarded people.” He then veers off into a commentary on a recent Supreme Court ruling, proclaiming that the Nader camp is “too well raised to say, ‘I told you so,’ ” barreling on to explain why the drug war isn’t working.

“Not in my lifetime,” he said, “have there been this many critical issues.”

Donahue said he “knows what it’s like to be called an anti-American” and be labeled a liberal and that there’s been “no attempt to encourage me to pretend I’m someone else.” For all his strong opinions, he said, the show will be fair, allowing guests with opposing viewpoints to have their say without featuring guests screaming at each other, as elsewhere on cable.

The show is being described as a cross between CNN’s Larry King and Donahue’s direct competitor in the time period, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. “Stylistically, the format will look more like Larry King,” said MSNBC President Erik Sorenson, but “the show will have more edge than Larry does.... He’s not going to be neutral.”

Donahue’s show is part of a broader overhaul of MSNBC that begins Monday, including two hours of midday debate from former California Democratic leader Bill Press and conservative Pat Buchanan and a new show hosted by Jerry Nachman, a former New York Post editor and longtime TV news executive. On the same night, “The News With Brian Williams” will start airing exclusively on CNBC.

Despite what seems to be his penchant for impassioned tirades, Donahue said, “I don’t think you can preach. It’s OK to make a point, but you can’t take all day doing it.” He’ll also participate in the celebrity booking wars, competing for sought-after guests with CNN’s King and Connie Chung, who airs opposite him.

“This is a celebrity culture,” he said. “It’s no good talking if people aren’t listening.”