Legendary US TV host Phil Donahue dead at 88

Phil Donahue has died at age 88, after a long illness. The trailblazing TV journalist is best known for involving audiences in his talk show that ran for almost three decades, as well as a series of cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Donahue died on Sunday, in the company of his wife Marlo Thomas, his sister, children, and grandchildren. His family did not give any details about the cause of death.

‘The Phil Donahue Show’ debuted in 1967 on a Dayton, Ohio station. The show, eventually renamed just ‘Donahue’, went into nationwide syndication in 1970, and Donahue became the star of daytime talk TV. The production moved to Chicago in 1974 and New York City in 1984. Its last episode aired in September 1996.

Among the notable Americans Donahue has interviewed over the years were then-presidential candidate and future US President John F. Kennedy and black activist Malcolm X, boxing champion Muhammad Ali, and scholar Noam Chomsky.

In the 1980s, Donahue and Soviet journalist Vladimir Pozner co-hosted a series of shows known as the US-Soviet Space Bridge. The never-before-done format featured live audiences in studios in both countries, asking each other questions.

A moment from a 1986 telecast ended up becoming the meme, “There is no sex in the USSR!” During a Leningrad-Boston bridge, titled “Women Talk to Women,” one of the Americans asked a Soviet whether they too had risque ads on TV, and the answer got a little lost in translation.

Pozner later revealed that the bridges were far more popular in the USSR, with an audience of an estimated 180 million, compared to only eight million Americans, because many US TV networks did not want to air them.

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Donahue came back from retirement in July 2002 to host a show on the cable network MSNBC, but was canceled in February 2003. According to an internal memo that was leaked to the press, the legendary journalist was fired because he opposed the upcoming invasion of Iraq and would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” as the network was owned by military contractor General Electric.

In 2007, Donahue revealed that MSNBC required him to have two conservative guests for every liberal.

“I was counted as two liberals,” he said.

Earlier this year, US President Joe Biden awarded Donahue the Presidential Medal of Freedom, usually bestowed for “an especially meritorious contribution” to either US national security, world peace, or “cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”