PressEthic

In July, 2002, MSNBC, which is co-owned by Microsoft and General Electric, began to air a program called Donahue, featuring talk show host Phil Donahue. The program, which appeared in a primetime slot, lasted just a few months and was cancelled in February 2003. According to MSNBC, low viewership was the problem; according to the Nielsen ratings, Donahue was the highest rated show on the network in its final month.

MSNBC approached the program as a sort of test of center-left talk shows, but ultimately, they sabotaged their own experiment. According to the Donahue senior producer, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting founder Jeff Cohen, the leadership at NBC News and GE micro-managed the political balance of the program from the beginning. In an interview on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show last week, Cohen said, "they started putting strictures on us from the first show. And then, as it got closer and closer to war, the screws got tighter on the Donahue show." The screws Cohen referred to include a strict formula for the political balance of the guests that appeared on the show. The network's approach, as Cohen describes it, is better suited for a giant punch line than press coverage in the runup to a war.

Cohen: So the last couple months we were ordered by management, these were firm orders, every time we booked a guest that was anti-war we had to book two that were pro-war. If we booked a guest on the left we had to book three on the right. At one staff meet-

Lopate: Because Donahue was seen as the other one on the left

Cohen: Eh, that never, look, they have right-wing hosts that they never, you know, flipped it over, and said your guest list has to be left wing. It had nothing to do with that. That was a crock. But at one meeting a producer said that she was thinking about booking Michael Moore and she was told that for ideological balance she’d have to have three right wingers. Now, I privately considered proposing Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, as a guest but you know, our studio and our stage couldn’t accommodate the twenty-eight right wingers we would have needed for balance.

Despite their deep involvement with the relative minutiae of the program, the executives at NBC were displeased with the show. A leaked internal NBC memo said Phil Donahue was a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war", because, "he seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives. The memo also expressed a fear that the show could become, "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

In that respect, the Donahue debacle sheds some light on the reason behind the many biases of the cable news networks.