I Blame Phil Donahue

If you don't know Phil Donahue or the Phil Donahue Show then you probably don't remember a time when you had to find a pay phone to call home. The Phil Donahue Show still holds the record for the longest continuous run of any syndicated talk show in U.S. television history. (Deal with that Oprah). His was the first talk show to have "controversial" guests on. There would be the cross dresser or the atheist or the occasional sex addict, tame by the guest list on the Jerry Springer Show today, but pushing it in the 70's and 80's. Phil is intelligent and could take a neutral position as host that was provocative, but not aggressive or insulting to his guests. But because of his success and innovations he may have ushered in an era of opinionated rudeness that thrives today.

After his interview he would take a microphone out into the crowd and let the audience ask questions of the guest. That was something new. Usually an audience was just there as a passive observer, the object of the discourse not a participant. It was a brilliant segment of the show at the time, but it was of a different time. More than a decade after his show ended and as that idea has been repeated by less able hosts it has degraded into an insult-fest of mudslinging and uncivilized rudeness.

The bastard seed of that brilliance gave birth to the Jerry Springer Show and Bill O'Reiley insult journalism. Audiences now feel they have the right and the misguided duty to comment on anything and everything they see and hear. Phil allowed the audience to ask questions. The narcissism of the crowd soon turned those questions into opinion and insults.

We have now become a society of commentors. We comment on anything and everything. Nothing is too complicated, too sensitive nor too personal that perfect strangers don't feel free to express their opinion about it. Every FaceBook action has a "comment" button, every editorial an email address and every radio station a call in number. And these comments are not for the most part researched, informed, intelligent opinions just a knee jerk ( I use the word jerk in all its contexts) reaction of "OMG WTF are you stupid?" I have written about this before in a previous blog on rudeness, but this rudeness has been born out of misguided sense of entitlement.

Maybe it is wrong to totally blame Phil. He may have invented the idea but others exploited it. He was smart and his audiences were smart back then. The IQ of the average Jerry Springer audience today is equivalent to pond algae. And Phil did, after all, have the good sense to go off the air in 1996 long before the Bush years when everyone knew they were smarter than the President.

I doubt we can get the genie back in the bottle, its sort of a free speech issue and everyone is entitled to an opinion. You can even have an opinion about an opinion, you can comment on a comment. Soon perhaps nothing will be taken as knowledge or truth just a stupid idea by some cloistered thinker with too much time on his hands...... WTF Mr. Plato?
As you were,
Jay