Media Mix Peter Johnson
Audience enlivens Donahue's talk show
MSNBC talk-show host Phil Donahue is taking a page from Mark Twain: Reports of his death appear to be an exaggeration.
Just weeks after parent network NBC was ready to pull the plug on Donahue's 6-month-old gig, he may have gotten a reprieve. Executives like his shows now that he has begun hosting before a studio audience, as he did in his old daytime talk days.
Thursday's program on angry white men drew 520,000 viewers, still third in the time slot but Donahue's best performance since moving back to Rockefeller Center in November.
Meanwhile, with MSNBC continuing to place dead last behind CNN and Fox News, NBC executives are determined to fix a channel that has embarrassed corporate owner GE. At GE, being second is acceptable. Being third is not.
How they intend to fix the channel isn't clear; outgoing Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura is said to be on tap. But MSNBC chief Erik Sorenson has assured his troops that GE intends to stick with it, despite reports that executives may be having second thoughts about the partnership with Microsoft.
Donahue acknowledges that he came dangerously close to getting the ax. "We've come through a lot of people who've been acting like Grim Reapers," he says. "I feel we're on the upswing." He says he didn't fully appreciate the energy that an audience can bring.
That's not to say the onetime talk-show king is out of the woods: Averaging fewer than 400,000 viewers, Donahue is a distant second to CNN's Connie Chung and is drawing less than a quarter of Bill O'Reilly's Fox News audience. "There are no guarantees," Donahue says. "There never will be."