When it was announced earlier this month, MSNBC's decision to drag talk-show host Phil Donahue out of the mothballs and set him up against Fox golden boy Bill O'Reilly met with what could charitably be called a less-than-enthusiastic reception.
Phil Rosenthal, television writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, noted that the cable network was taking a large risk by hiring a "66-year-old retiree" whose old daytime talk show "seemed almost quaint by the time dwindling ratings hastened its end in 1996." The move disclosed an "utter lack of imagination," wrote Fox alum John Ellis, and signaled a surrender in the war for the younger audience that MSNBC was set up to attract. Joel Miller, an editor at WorldNetDaily.com -- the birthplace of O'Reilly's syndicated column -- didn't think much of the hire either. "He's old, he's dry, he's a fossil," Miller said of Donahue. The near septuagenarian, it seems, is doomed to failure before he has even begun.
The critics aren't just frothing at the mouth on this one. In addition to the issue of Donahue's age -- the horrible mismatch between him and MSNBC's target audience -- there are a whole host of other reasons to be skeptical that he'll succeed. For example, it's unclear that his name carries even the minimal weight that it did in the 1990s, which will force MSNBC to spend precious time and resources re-inflating the host's profile. The planned format is also all wrong: Donahue minus a studio audience, the lifeblood of his old show, might be "dignified" but it sounds dreadfully boring. All in all, it's hard to imagine him being able to take on the mega-successful O'Reilly, who has proven very effective at attracting viewers and keeping them. A recent USA Today story by Peter Johnson placed O'Reilly nightly audience at 2.1 million viewers, which blows away second-rated Larry King (who manages to draw 1.3 million viewers an hour later on rival CNN).
But maybe the idea that Donahue will "compete" with O'Reilly is misleading. The standard line among close watchers of the cable news set is that with the added strain of O'Reilly starting a new radio talk show (which is going to flop), the next couple of months present a brief window for the other cable news channels to make inroads into Fox's lucrative lair. So CNN has countered with Connie Chung and MSNBC, which ranks a distant third in the ratings, has offered Donahue. In this context, the Donahue choice clearly looks stupid, as other talking heads would much more likely be able to navigate the minefields of O'Reilly's populist, religious audience.
But suppose the plan isn't to have Donahue steal O'Reilly's viewers. Suppose that MSNBC isn't trying to cut into O'Reilly's audience at all, but rather to create a completely different political/ideological talk-show formula?
After all, consider Donahue's actual politics. For one, he's a pious atheist, a viewpoint represented nowhere in the cable news media. Indeed, in a 2000 interview in The Progressive, he was still bragging about introducing the world to the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair. Similarly, he campaigned for Ralph Nader in 2000, complaining of the stranglehold of "corporate power" on the political process. Whatever you may think of this particular brand of politics, like atheism it's not well represented in the small world of cable news.
Could going the atheist-Nader route create a new television audience? Well, 2.8 million people in this country did vote for Nader, and when polled perhaps as many as 14 percent of the U.S. population describes itself as non-religious. That's not exactly a small swath of the American population. Maybe MSNBC is on to something after all.
MSNBC's brass has, at different points, whispered that it isn't interested in siphoning off viewers from O'Reilly. Normally that could be dismissed as advance spin to lower expectations -- what cable channel wouldn't give its right arm for a shot at even a third of O'Reilly's viewers? -- but MSNBC President Erik Sorenson has been saying some interesting things about the hire and about his company that force us to consider the possibility that they may be true.
In Sorenson's estimation, his hiring of the explicitly Naderite Donahue represents "counter-programming" to O'Reilly. Indeed, this appears to be the view that he is taking of the channel as a whole. A memo released to MSNBC staff on April 11 and leaked to The Associated Press said that the channel's image should be "fiercely independent." It also took a shot at Fox News's claims of being "fair and balanced" by saying that MSNBC would showcase "real fairness." Some news channels, Sorenson complained, "stack the deck with partisans from one side and offset them with patsies from the other. But our channel is not partisan and has no agenda, other than to serve the American people, serve our viewers, give them in-depth coverage and thorough analysis."
At first glance, Sorenson's notion that one highlights one's fairness or nonpartisanship by hiring Phil Donahue, a screaming leftist and atheist, seems curious. But perhaps it's not the extreme nature of Donahue's views that count so much as the fact that they're remarkably underrepresented in cable news. MSNBC may be attempting a true rarity in this media age: letting a thousand flowers bloom.
