Media:

...Interviewing Milton Friedman, the brilliant conservative economist, he is truly consternated at Friedman's outrageous (and quite sane) defense of the free-enterprise system...

...And that is the counterfeiting of the self: Donahue, in seance, interviews the ghost of Elvis about the price of fame...

...Rather, he wanders through his audience, hand-held mike brandished (a Vegas gimmick if there ever was one), firing earnest questions at the stage...

...Now there is nothing wrong with drama...

...Well-runs the predictably boring sociologist's answer-a culture that had lost, largely, the art of conversation and therefore needed to be reminded, however artificially, of its existence...

...In fact, a little too eager: you can't watch Donahue for any length of time without realizing-first uncomfortably, then surely-that his enthusiasm for discussion, his consuming interest in fairness, his boyish eagerness to understand, is a performance...

...But then, so ought diet cola...

...That's his talent, and that's his curse...

...And contemporary radio shows-the pompously proletarian Studs Terkel, the fluent Larry King, and the brilliant Milt Rosenberg- are all, in one way or another, spin-offs from the television phenomenon...

...Or better, for what kind of culture is conversation-the most civilized and delicate of skills- a spectator sport...

...The talk show: or the talk show: what kind of culture would find entertainment watching people converse...

...He is famous, of course, for discussing controversial topics: gun control, gay activism, the decline of the Roman Catholic church, and transsexuality have all featured-often-on his shows...

...He is, in other words, both in his charm and in his attitude the Liberace of ideas...

...If the "talk show" is, as I've said, an artificial representation of what real talk is like, then Donahue is the perfect incarnation of that ideological emptiness...

...Chicago's Mayor Jane Byrne) or an accomplished snake-oil salesman, (e.g., Jesse Jackson), Donahue tends to fade...

...Perhaps it is that "passion for ideas" that is at the heart of the problem with Donahue...

...Donahue's audience is predominantly white, middle class, and female: a much-maligned, much-satirized group who are, nevertheless, by and large sensitive, caring human beings...

...You can't help feel, watching him go through his motions, that he really believes in his own earnestness...

...Johnny Carson, of course is hors de combat...

...He is, after all- as he confesses to great length in his smarmy autobiography-a Notre Dame boy, an ex-Catholic who saw the light of liberal reason sometime after the breakup of his first marriage, and has been pursuing it ever since...

...Media WATCHING TALK DONAHUE AS DIET COLA WHEN THE MARTIANS finally arrive on the burnt-out cinder of Earth, and their tentacled anthropologists try to reconstruct our civilization from newspapers, LP records, and video tapes, I think they will be especially fascinated by that distinctive twentieth century form of drama, the talk show...

...Of course, like Liberace (who first uttered the phrase that has become part of the language of hype), he may simply cry all the way to the bank about all this...

...Unlike most hosts, he never sits on the stage with his guests...

...With his open, handsome Irish face, his authentic spontaneity, and his evident passion for ideas, he ought to be the real thing...

...Donahue's spontaneity, on the other hand, is more disingenuous (for which read, if you want, "nastier...

...Like Chicago's silly Wrigley Building, New York's bag ladies, and L.A.'s flatulent air, he is so much a part of the landscape as to be virtually undiscussable, even in an odd way unnoticeable (I mean, do you notice the grilled cheese sandwich you always have for lunch...

...It claims to be a sincere commitment to knee-jerk liberal idealisms, but in fact it turns out to be as stage-managed and as predictable as the creakiest melodrama from a sophomore creative writing course...

...And he is invariably sympathetic, concerned, eager to give the proponents of unpopular ideas a fair chance to be heard...

...He is always truly something...

...Hypocrisy, after all, is idealism turned inside out...

...All that existential heroism, one thinks...

...But the more one watches, the more one realizes it's also camouflage, a way of hiding out from the full responsibility of conversing-which, after all, is what the show is supposed to be about...

...But in pandering radical ideas to this audience, and in frequently bullying or making fun of this audience when they ask reasonable, if conservative, questions of his guests, he manages to have things both ugly ways at once...

...And then one realizes that this riveting confession is part of the dinner show, repeating night after night, with even the breaks in the voice preprogrammed into the act...

...But, ex- or not, that altarboy sweetness not only remains, it's his stock in trade...

...The society that created Donahue and People magazine may have one big problem with personalities: we may not be able to tolerate them in their true bravery and independence until we have reduced them to media events, role-players trapped in their own roles...

...Challenging, controversial, even disruptive ideas are his joy and his toy...

...Confronted with a real conversational street-fighter (e.g...

...Interviewing a "married'' gay couple wishing to adopt a child, he is truly concerned with their plight...

...If Donahue is the talk show at its barest and baldest, then isn't this hiding-out maneuver-which he alone practices-a kind of admission that the audience, including you and me, is not only hungry for ideas, hungry for the sting of conversation, but also somehow frightened of it...

...If the hypocrite and burglar at least know where the real gold is, and recognize its value, the counterfeiter shortcircuits the whole structure of value: it may be why Dante put the false-coiners so low in Hell...

...It is rather like watching Sammy Davis, Jr...

...He does to ideas what Liberace did to classical music in the fifties: cheapening it, and thereby implicitly cheapening his audience...

...but only as long as they remain within the borders of the nice, only as long as they can be broken down into "terms an ordinary guy can understand," to paraphase himself on any of a thousand occasions...

...It is a clever piece of theater, because it establishes that Phil is one of us...

...and, of course, it also puts the poor guests at a maximum disadvantage (one of them...

...But, as anybody who's ever been in the grip of an idea will tell you, that's just what really important ideas aren't...

...But I wonder...

...It is not that this may not be a true explanation of the popularity of the form, at least in part: it is just that it does not fully explain the whole complexity, variety, and sometimes insidiousness of the form as it is practiced...

...Why is it, one wonders, that the most successful, popular, and universally liked talk show host on television is also the most egregious...

...Like Sammy Davis playing himself, Paul Scofield can play King Lear night after night and still excite us...

...The problem is that that something is always just the business of being Phil Donahue...

...Who would have missed Merv Griffin, with the solemnity of a bishop, interviewing Paul Newman (Paul Newman...

...And then there is Phil Donahue...

...all that triumphant selfhood, winning through against any obstacle...

...That is, identifies himself as one of them, one of the ordinary decent folk, until it is to his conversational advantage to separate himself from them, thereby establishing his own more passionately committed understanding of the problem at hand (be it abortion or day-care centers or the balance of trade...

...But in their case the charade of conviction knows that it's a charade...

...But the Mervs, Mikes, Dinahs, Dicks, and others who populate so much of daytime television serve a rich-if a little goofy-cocktail of ideas...

...In the golden age of radio, there was no such thing as a "talk show": the format had to wait for television, for the experience of watching people talk...

...He has turned the liberal knee-jerk into a high-stepping cake-walk...

...So much of his personality is invested in being nice that he really can't handle people willing to be less than sweet for the sake of making a point...

...Not that he is a hypocrite...

...on nuclear disarmament...

...the really skilled hypocrite, like the really successful burglar, knows where the gold is hidden, and how valuable it is...

...And the price is the interview...

...sing "I've Gotta Be Me" in Vegas...

...or better yet, of what we think of as ideas at this point in the century...

...FRANK McCONNELL...

...or Dinah Shore, face frozen in a smile, watching Andy Kaufman systematically demolish her whole, chat-in-the-living-room format...

...And I wonder about the intellectual insecurity the talk show in general suggests, and Donahue in particular represents...