Astoundingly (at least to me), my reagan-loving tax-hating Republican dad watched Donahue EVERY day. Never missed his show. From way back BEFORE there even was an MSNBC. Back in the late 60s and 70s. He had a syndicated show based out of Chicago.
That's one thing I will always hold against Oprah Winfrey. Yes, I know that's sacrilege to some. And YES she's done much good, since.
But she came on the talk show scene in Chicago and went after him, because up till then he'd been the only game in town (and the nation, too, for that matter). Her show copied the same format that HE had pioneered - the roving host wandering around IN the audience sharing the hand-held mic with whoever wanted to stand up and comment or ask a question. Donahue was widely respected and well-established and she knew she had to get noticed if she was to knock him off the top. So, to make a splash and get a lot of attention, she went straight for the salacious. "Lesbian nuns!" and "I ran off with my father's illicit love child!" and "Abandoned. Beaten and raped. But she's having his baby!" and so forth. NO JOKE! Hell, I still remember the promo spots for the "Lesbian nuns!" episode. With the salacious-sounding woman's voice doing the voice-over. I'd be driving somewhere and that spot would come on the radio in high rotation.
She was, as we all know, wildly successful. It wasn't just her wildly appealing personality (that still serves, pleases, and genuinely inspires). It was her programming strategy. Go for the wildly salacious. Push the boundaries. Push the envelope. Go lower and grittier. If Phil went low, she went lower. If Phil went into the bedroom, she found the bedroom with the leather straps and handcuffs. She was the mother of Geraldo Rivera, Morton Downey Junior, Maury Povich, Jerry Springer, and all the rest of those scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel junk talk shows where fists would literally start flying and chairs would be thrown and all the folks you'd see in those websites of Walmart shoppers dressed in their "wife-beater" t-shirts or with their thong underwear or butt cracks showing, were transformed from commoners (and usually white trash commoners at that) to TV celebrity status. Lowest common denominator stuff.
What happened after that was - Phil Donahue's ratings started dropping. Everybody wanted to watch the freak show instead of the quiet, thought-provoking hour-long interview with some intelligent author or researcher or thinker-of-our-times. Now you needed the salaciousness. And so he started dumbing down his show, too - to compete. And the low point came on the day he did his entire show wearing a dress. I can still remember the media coverage of it. It was along the lines of - "what Donahue has to stoop to doing now, to try to get ratings (because Oprah's sleaze and gutter topics and goons on parade were beating the hell outta him). And he finally got canceled.
But the REAL damage had been done. Civil discourse on television was so yesterday. Now you wanted flash and trash. The trashier the better! You wanted to see fights break out on the set and see Geraldo get his nose broken - because Geraldo realized that, to compete with Oprah, he had to go even lower and even sleazier. So did Maury and all the wannabes who came after him. Hell, Jerry Springer was the mayor of Cincinatti and an anchorman and super respectable at one time! I had a friend who lived in Cincinatti and attested to how terrific and even noble he was as a public servant. She confessed to being shocked out of her socks when she saw him doing his low-life shit-show thing on TV. She was stunned by how far he'd fallen and how low he now stooped for the sake of attention and ratings. Suddenly the airwaves were filled with this sleazy tabloid shit. Because it got ratings.
Eventually, of course, Phil Donahue was recruited on a fledgling MSNBC because he had a marquee name, and his show went well - because he went back to intelligent discourse with intelligent uplifting people. And it got ratings there. Until he was fired.
Eventually, of course, Oprah Winfrey saw the light and started using her show as a vehicle to lift people up, rather than merely titillate them for the sake of sheer empty bottom-scraping titillation. Which was a real relief. And in many ways, her show became a serious and wonderful and much-needed public service once she decided it was time to pull the whole works out of the frickin' gutter.
But it was too late.
The damage had been done.
And the bar kept getting set lower and lower until you needed a shovel to dig a pit before you could even set the bar. Now that I think of it, seems to me that's where and how reality TV got started, with the wall-to-wall sleaze and lowest-common-denominator crap for which it's now famous. Oprah even midwifed things like the Kardashians and the losers on "Jersey Shore" and other cheap tabloid jerks. She paved the way for all that. She WAS the climate change. She finally got religion and used that fabulous billion-dollar pulpit and all that power and clout she'd earned - for the greater good. But she got there by swimming through shit. And nobody else who jumped into the shit-pool to get a piece of all that ever got religion and climbed out, hoping to pull others out too. They stayed in the shit and did everything they could to spread it wider and deeper and thicker. Which is where we are now.
That's how a Donald Trump could rise and thrive, too, come to think of it.
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Mahlao, trueblue!