Battling For The Soul Of Phil Donahue

While last week's decision by MSNBC to cancel "Donahue" may not have come as a surprise to most observers, the announcement did come as almost a relief to some of the people who worked on the show. "This has been the longest few months of my life," sighed one person I spoke with on Thursday. "Dealing with the...oh, just everything. Really, everyday was just another argument over the show. At some point, the entire process feels like you're being pecked to death by ducks."

By all accounts, the show initially seemed likely to succeed. The show debuted to strong ratings numbers, with close to a million viewers watching the first night. While the critics weren't universally kind to the format, there was a lot of positive press coverage--something that MSNBC was sorely lacking.

But after speaking with more than a dozen people at the network and with numerous former "Donahue" staffers and associates, it's clear that in retrospect, the honeymoon was already over.

In the two plus months between Donahue's hiring and the debut of his show, there had been a marked shift in the way several high-ranking MSNBC executives looked at the program. That shift resulted in several early decisions about the mix of guests, decisions which by all accounts helped to sow the seeds of the show's ultimate collapse.

From the beginning, there was a small but steady stream of complaints from viewers (or those who claimed to be), decrying Donahue's liberal opinions. While the complaints weren't closely monitored by network executives, there was a growing feeling that Donahue's political beliefs may be a problem in the future. Network executives I spoke with admitted that there had been a directive aimed at the show, which mandated a "fair, but lively" mix of viewpoints-both left and right. They also admit to an early fear that the show may be a "troublesome issue" as the U.S. lurched closer to a war with Iraq.

There were also the odd bits of feedback from the parent network NBC. While the broadcast news division made a point of keeping a hands-off stance with MSNBC, that didn't prevent the cable network getting feedback from the sister network. One MSNBC executive recalled hearing complaints from Jack Welch, who said he had friends asking him "what's going on at that network?"

But many of the show's biggest boosters felt that the guidelines hamstrung a format that was being challenged by critics from the right. Rather than "letting Phil be Phil," imposing a "quota system on guests" resulted in shows that often degenerated into shouting matches between liberal and conservatives. A person hired by the network approved the booking decisions and often insisted that there be two conservative guests for every one that was perceived to be liberal. "Sometimes the show ended up being some warped version of 'Crossfire,' which wasn't what we (the network) wanted," explained one high-placed NBC News official. "And it wasn't doing Donahue any favors, either."

One of the high-ranking production people on the show recounted the number of times potential show ideas were shot down, or watered down to the point where the original pitch didn't make any sense. "We wanted to do more stories about Iraq and other foreign policy issues and at one point I was told that we needed to limit those segments to no more than one every few days," he described. "I was never told not to book someone, but at some point you find yourself falling back to the position of picking your battles. Unfortunately that means a lot of good people didn't get heard on our show."

Ironically, while liberals may have found the show's editorial mix unsatisfying, those inside the network often felt the show still leaned too far left for advertiser's comfort. One email from that period discussed the "challenges" faced by MSNBC as it attempted to promote the show. "...and after watching last night's show, I'm not sure what type of show we're doing....forget the constant braying back and forth between guests," complained one network insider. "Tell me, are we reaching our core audience? Sometimes, I feel as if I'm watching MSNPR, rather than a network associated with NBC News."

All of this was going on at the same time as a frustrating stall in the ratings of the show. By late August, network executives had began to discuss ways to boost the numbers, and for many, that meant moving the show towards a more "centrist, women-friendly environment." In fact, NBC executives have consistently claimed that they had hoped for a show that was attractive to an "undeserved demographic...women, libertarians, the Middle American Silent Majority that should be the core of our audience."

The difficulty with that targeting is that by accounts, it's a tough sell at best. A ratings analyst from a rival network explained the problem this way. "You're asking younger women to watch cable news, which they traditionally don't do. You're asking them to do it in primetime, against some of their favorite programming. And you're asking them to watch a host who seems ill-suited to the task. Donahue is a genius, but this wasn't his audience or his battle. They misjudged their audience, and both sides paid the price."

Liberal critics of the show come to a similar conclusion, but for different reasons. "There is a huge liberal base out here who wanted to watch the show," says one liberal critic. "But they didn't embrace that audience. They were afraid of it. They didn't advertise in progressive publications, and they had this odd compulsion to program flaccid celebrity shows, which is great if you're Larry King. It's not so good if you're competing against Bill O'Reilly, who has a focused approach that is damn near zen-like."

The battling for the heart and soul of the show escalated after the results of an October focus group further convinced network news executives that Phil needed "some help" turning the show around. That focus group led to a series of additional "fine-tuning" moves, with special attention being given to Phil himself. "I personally like Donahue, but our numbers were telling us that viewers thought he has too combative, and often said things that some respondents considered almost unpatriotic," says one network insider. "In retrospect, I think we may have overreacted, but I honestly thought we were doing what was best for the show."

By the time January began, the pressure from executives at NBC and GE had reportedly become so persistent that the normally private Donahue began making veiled references to the situation during his show.

"I believe that the drumbeat has been so powerful, so everywhere, that it has literally intimidated people who might want to dissent from the war," he said during a January 6th show called "Is There A Conservative Bias In The Media?" "They’re going to be called unpatriotic. I was called unpatriotic by a person in this very NBC-MSNBC family. This is very difficult out there. At a time when we need dissent the most, everybody is sitting back and afraid."

Whether it was fear or business that drove the move towards Donahue's cancellation, the process was moving along behind the scenes. One email from this period discusses the look of a postwar, post-Donahue, MSNBC. The executive noted that the war with Iraq would be a chance for the network to "reinvent itself" and take advantage of the "anticipated larger audience who will tune in during a time of war."

The email went on to note that the war coverage would give the network to opportunity to "cross-pollinate our programming," by fitting network personalities into the wall-to-wall war coverage. "It's unlikely that we can use Phil in this way, particularly given his public stance on the advisability of the war effort." The author went on to explain that the network needed additional voices who were comfortable and knowledgeable in "both an environment of war and of peace."

While it's unclear just when the decision was made to cancel Donahue, nearly everyone interviewed for this piece believe that the reasons are more complex than just liberal vs. conservative. "This is a ratings-driven business, and it's important not to lose track of that in this discussion," one CNN executive told me on Monday. "But I won't lie and tell you that your public beliefs and persona don't matter to viewers....There are a lot of people out there who believe that the press is inherently liberal. And I would be an idiot if I did anything to encourage that conversation."

One journalist who works at a competing network says that in the end, the most important lesson to come out of this story is the increasing use of focus groups and polling to determine news programming. "While Donahue isn't claiming to be Edward R. Murrow--he is a talk show host--he's talking about the news, with newsmakers. It's a distinction that escapes most viewers anyway. And if we're moving towards a future where network wonks are testing everything before they let us report it...Well, frankly, that scares the hell out of me."