The shouting heads on cable are making me crazy. Perhaps this will provide some respite.
Donahue to Be Opposite O'Reilly, in More Ways Than One
By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, April 4, 2002; Page C07
Veteran talk show host Phil Donahue is returning to television to take on Bill O'Reilly, as host of a new MSNBC prime-time program.
Donahue's new talk show will run at 8 p.m. weeknights, directly opposite the mightiest mouth in cable news. It will debut sometime this summer.
"I want to win," Donahue told reporters during a telephone news conference yesterday. "It's even more exciting to go against a personality that has been so successful. Let's ring the bell and see what happens."
He said he welcomes the ideological battle as well.
"If you want to describe me as coming from the left and O'Reilly as coming from the right, that's okay with me," said Donahue, who campaigned for Ralph Nader in 2000.
Donahue said O'Reilly has asked him to appear on Fox News Channel's "O'Reilly Factor" and that he will do so if O'Reilly will agree to invite Connie Chung to be on the same program, which Donahue said would be the gentlemanly thing to do.
(Chung is to launch a new program on CNN in the same time slot sometime this spring; hers will be more of a straight newscast, however.)
Plus, Donahue said, O'Reilly had to agree to go on Donahue's show when it debuted, adding that he planned to invite Chung as well.
Asked for comment on the scheduling of Donahue against O'Reilly, a Fox News Channel spokesman got back to us with the following: "MSNBC is irrelevant," adding: "We wish Donahue well."
Erik Sorenson, MSNBC's president and general manager, said the hire was part of the six-year-old network's move away from documentary programming to "op-ed" television.
After Sept. 11, Sorenson said, viewers were not as interested in the kind of long-form programming that MSNBC had embraced in its latest makeover. They were looking for cable news networks "to see if the world is still in one piece" each day, he said.
"That forced us to abandon that strategy and move on."
Meanwhile, Donahue credits Sept. 11 with his decision to get back in the game, citing the "growing unease across America about where we are going.
"Now more than ever in the entire lifetime of this most remarkable democratic experiment in the history of civilization have the instruments of our Constitution been more important to us," he intoned.
"Now more than ever we need to promote and celebrate free speech. Now more than ever we should be vigilant regarding our Bill of Rights, remembering that these are the bedrock of our constitutional democracy."
NBC News President Neal Shapiro said Donahue's hire was the first of "many, many" steps the company is taking to revamp MSNBC, a perennial also-ran. MSNBC's daily average audience is under 300,000 viewers, and its prime-time audience about a quarter of Fox News Channel's.
Donahue, who got his start as a local TV host in Dayton, Ohio, went national in 1970 and dominated daytime ratings until Oprah Winfrey's show took over in the late '80s. But his show lasted until May 1996, when in-your-face talk shows like Jerry Springer's became the vogue.
Donahue did return to TV briefly on an unsuccessful CNBC talk show that he hosted with Russian commentator Vladimir Posner.
Ironically, even at the time his long-running "Donahue" show was canceled, he was averaging 2.1 million viewers daily, which is what O'Reilly has been averaging the past couple of quarters.
That's also more viewers than the average audiences for all of MSNBC's prime-time shows put together. In his heyday, Donahue's daytime show, which was aimed toward women, averaged nearly 6 million viewers.
Unlike his old show, the new one will not have a studio audience.
"This is a new phase in the legend that is Donahue," Sorenson said. "That phase in daytime talk was fantastic. . . . We want to concentrate on conversation and ideas. We want close shots and close-ups and a studio setting that's quiet and dignified." Reminded by one reporter that he usually touts the fact that his network does better with 18-to-49-year-olds than the other cable news nets, and that Donahue is 66 years old, Sorenson informed the press that when it comes to news programming, young people don't prefer to watch young people.
Young viewers will enjoy Donahue, he said, adding "and if middle-aged and older viewers want to come in, too, that's terrific."
Added Donahue: "When you think Phil, you think hip-hop . . . and we're going to exploit that at 8 o'clock."
To open up the 8 p.m. time slot, MSNBC's newscast with Brian Williams is being shifted to 7 p.m. and "Hardball" with Chris Matthews to 9 p.m. Ashleigh Banfield's news report will be moved to 10 p.m., bumping "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense" to 11 p.m.
As part of the MSNBC overhaul, "Hardball" will become exclusive to MSNBC, no longer shared with CNBC. And the number of times Williams's show runs each day will be slashed from five to three.
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© 2002 The Washington Post Company |
