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Fired by MSNBC for Giving Voice to Iraq War Opposition, Phil Donahue (1935-2024) Was Courage Personified
The journalist and TV show host, who died Sunday at the age of 88, made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life and the lives of so many others.
Aug 19, 2024
Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.
He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty-much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly, and morally—questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.
Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.
I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”
But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day in 2002; a full hour with veteran journalist Studs Terkel; interviews with progressive members of Congress, including Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich; and segments with the "maverick" Texas Observer columnist Molly Ivins; and offered platforms to foreign policy experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders as well as Palestinian advocates, including Hanan Ashrawi.
No one on American television cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.
But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq war—she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.
Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)
Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: “Body of War,” on the life and death of Tomas Young.
Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.
He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.
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50 Arrested in Jewish-Led Protest of Gaza Genocide at Biden TV Taping
"The president needs to start answering to the American people—not the far-right Israeli government indiscriminately bombing the people of Gaza," said Jewish Voice for Peace.
Feb 26, 2024
The historic wave of Jewish-led protests against U.S. complicity in Isreal's genocidal war on Gaza continued Monday as members of the group Jewish Voice for Peace were arrested for occupying NBC headquarters in New York City in a bid to disrupt the taping of President Joe Biden's appearance on a popular late-night TV show.
JVP activists wearing shirts reading "Not In Our Name" unfurled banners and chanted slogans inside 30 Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan, where Biden was taping an interview with the eponymous host of the "Late Night Show With Seth Meyers."
"Biden, Biden, you can't hide, you are funding genocide," the protesters chanted. Banners implored the president to "Stop Arming Genocide" and push for a "Lasting Cease-Fire" in Gaza, where more than 100,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded and around 90% of the population has been forcibly displaced since the October 7 attacks on Israel.
"President Biden's deadly foreign policy has expedited weapons sales to Israel," said Jewish Voice for Peace New York, which also criticized the administration for ignoring the International Court of Justice's provisional ruling last month that Israel is "plausibly" perpetrating genocide, suspending funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and vetoing three U.N. cease-fire resolutions.
"The president needs to start answering to the American people—not the far-right Israeli government indiscriminately bombing the people of Gaza, destroying 70% of infrastructure, including hospitals, universities, and the electricity and water grids," the group added.
Jay Saper of JVP said Monday that "our Jewish tradition teaches us that life is precious."
"As Jewish New Yorkers, we are absolutely outraged that President Biden is actively supporting a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza," he added.
In addition to taping Tuesday's "Late Night" episode, Biden and Meyers visited the on-site Van Leeuwen ice cream parlor, where the president ordered mint chip in a sugar cone. While there, a reporter asked when there would be a cease-fire in Gaza.
"My national security adviser tells me that we're close, we're close; it's not done yet," Biden replied. "My hope is by next Monday we'll have a cease-fire."
Early in the war, Biden
proclaimed his "rock-solid and unwavering" commitment to Israel while refusing to call for a cease-fire. As Israeli bombs and bullets killed and maimed tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly women and children—the president asked for over $14 billion in additional U.S. military aid to Israel, which already receives nearly $4 billion from Washington annually. Biden also repeatedly circumvented Congress to expedite emergency military assistance to the key Middle East ally.
Even after calling Israel's bombardment of Gaza "indiscriminate" and "over the top," Biden has continued to provide the country with military and diplomatic support.
Demonstrations led by JVP and other Jewish-led groups, chiefly IfNotNow, have filled the streets of cities from coast to coast, shut down major transit hubs, occupied landmarks, disrupted Biden's campaign events, and much more in the name of demanding an immediate cease-fire and an end to U.S. complicity in the Gaza genocide.
"The president needs to start answering to the American people. Not the genocidal Israeli government," JVP activist Eve Feldberg said on Monday. "And the people have made it clear: We want a cease-fire now and weapons embargo on Israel."
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The US Mainstream Media Beats the China War Drums
A recent NBC Nightly News segment perfectly illustrates the media’s usefulness in the hawks’ endeavor to seek a more confrontational relationship with the rising superpower.
Aug 14, 2023
As the United States tries to navigate a new world order in which China has emerged as its primary competitor and at times rival, hawks in Washington, the weapons industry, and other financially or politically interested parties are seeking to base that relationship on fear, confrontation, and animosity rather than healthy competition and cooperation.
A seemingly unwitting ally in that pursuit is the U.S. mainstream media, and a recent NBC Nightly News segment perfectly illustrates its usefulness in the hawks’ endeavor.
The story focused on a recent joint Chinese-Russian naval exercise near the Alaska coast and it had all the elements to lead one to the conclusion that only a more militaristic and confrontational posture would be the most appropriate response.
Quincy Institute Research Fellow Jake Werner, whose expertise focuses on U.S.-China relations, called the NBC story “an unusually glaring example of ostensibly independent U.S. media uncritically adopting” a militaristic approach to the world.
First, hype the threat. Anchor Peter Alexander set the story up as “just the latest close call” between Russia and China and the U.S. without saying exactly what the close call was.
NBC reporter Aaron Gilchrist then said the military exercises were “being called an incursion” without saying just who was saying that, and later he referred to the drill as an “aggressive maneuver” without describing what was aggressive about it. In fact, Gilchrist even acknowledged that the Russian and Chinese navies “never entered U.S. waters.”
Second, the segment completely ignored the wider context and the complexities of U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia relations, which could have helped to explain Russian and Chinese motives for conducting these drills so close to American territory, including the possibility that they were responding to similar U.S. military activity close to their own respective countries.
And lastly, this all led to the idea that more money for the Pentagon is in order. “Alaska senators today (are) renewing calls for increased investment in military power in Alaska,” Gilcrhist said—without any examination of whether that is even necessary.
A spokesman for U.S. Northern Command said that U.S. military assets were deployed “to assure the defense of the United States and Canada” and that the Russian and Chinese patrol “remained in international waters and was not considered a threat.” That description of events stands in stark contrast to NBC’s Alexander and Gilchrist calling it a “close call,” “an incursion,” and an “aggressive maneuver.” And NORTHCOM’s statement in no way implies that the military needs more assets to address the issue.
(This also isn’t the first time Russian and Chinese naval vessels have patrolled the region and it isn’t the first timeNBC Nightly News has hyped the China threat.)
Quincy Institute Research Fellow Jake Werner, whose expertise focuses on U.S.-China relations, called the NBC story “an unusually glaring example of ostensibly independent U.S. media uncritically adopting” a militaristic approach to the world.
“An even-handed approach would have noted that the U.S. is doing the same thing (with greater frequency) and that China doing so is part of an escalatory action-reaction dynamic to which the U.S. is very much also contributing,” Werner told RS. “Instead, China’s action is an ‘aggressive maneuver,’ while examples of the U.S. doing the same thing are actually featured—but without the necessary context and only to make the claim that China is aggressive.”
Indeed, Blake Herzinger, a research fellow at the United States Studies Center in Australia, agrees. According to CNN, he echoed NORTHCOM’s assessment that the Chinese and Russian naval exercise was not a threat and that they “acted according to international law just as U.S. Navy vessels do when operating off the Chinese or Russian coasts.”
But, he added, “Chinese responses to similar [American-led] operations in the Indo-Pacific… hype up imagined threats and broadcast their military response as efforts to eject invaders from their waters.”
So while both sides are threat-hyping these respective naval exercises, on the American side, it appears that the U.S. mainstream media is the one doing all the heavy lifting.
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