Amid the war fever over Iraq in 2002, legendary talk show host Phil Donahue returned to television with an MSNBC program that allowed antiwar voices to speak – but his corporate chieftains soon pulled the plug, a shameful moment in U.S. journalism explored in this interview with Dennis Bernstein.
From the early 1970s to 1985, The Phil Donahue Show was
broadcast nationally from Chicago. Donahue also co-hosted a compelling
political talk show — with Vladimir Pozner of the former Soviet Union —
called This Week with Pozner and Donahue from 1991-1994.
Phil
Donahue, left, campaigns for North Coast congressional candidate Norman
Solomon in Sebastopol on Monday, Jan. 9, 2012. (Christopher Chung/
PressDemocrat)In July 2002, MSNBC hired him to host a free-wheeling TV talk show, which hyped the return of Donahue.
However, eight months later during the run-up to war with Iraq,
behind-the-scenes pressure from the Bush White House — and a groundswell
of conservative outrage — led MSNBC to give the anti-war TV talk-show
host the boot.
It mattered little that Donahue had won nine Daytime Emmys and a
Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1996. MSNBC claimed Donahue’s ratings were
too low to justify keeping the show on the air, even though Donahue was the highest rated show on MSNBC at the time it was canceled and beat out Chris Matthews‘s Hardball, which was then on CNBC.
After Donahue was cancelled, AllYourTV.com reported it had
obtained a copy of an internal NBC memo that stated Donahue should be
fired because he would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of
war.”
We caught up with Donahue at the campaign headquarters of Norman Solomon for Congress,
in San Raphael, California, about 20 miles north of San Francisco’s
Golden Gate Bridge. He had come into town to show his moving film “Body
of War” and to campaign for Solomon.
DB: Phil Donahue has come into town to show a very
compelling film that he produced called “Body of War” in 2007. It’s a
very thoughtful film about a young vet, named Thomas Young, who was
paralyzed in Iraq, and went through a transformation. … It wasn’t meant
to be a dogmatic attack at policy but it turned into something that made
you really think about war and peace, and why we send young people off
to war.
So, in that context, we’ve been at many wars for a long time
here. We’re thinking that there’s some end to the U.S. involvement in
the war in Iraq. But now, everything looks like, and it’s getting worse
that there might be some kind of tangle, and a very terrible tangle,
with Iran. Your response to current policy, war policy, and your
thoughts on that.
PD: Well, Rick Santorum is scaring me. He’s got
both guns out. The Straits of Hormuz, if they [the Iranians] block
that, you can see how we get into war. That’s one of the reasons why I
admire Norman so much, he is making the point that it’s much too easy
for a president to go to war.
And I discovered Thomas Young at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. …
Here was this kid, 24-years old, pale as the sheet, whacked out on
morphine. And as I stood and looked down at him and his mother told me
how paralyzed he was; he’s a T4 which anatomists knows is paralyzed from
the nipples down. Thomas can’t cough. Thomas has bowel and bladder
every morning, nausea.
He is a warrior turned anti-warrior. He came home from the war
absolutely stunned at its horror, that it wasn’t necessary. He went to
Fort Hood and immediately said, “Why am I going to Iraq, I thought I was
going to Afghanistan?” Too late now, he goes there, he goes to Iraq and
he’s there five days, no top on the truck, main street in Sadr City,
and he takes a bullet through the collar bone and exited T4 in his
spine. He will never walk again.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And then it occurred to me how
sanitized this war was. I mean you couldn’t. … The president [George W.
Bush] said, “don’t take pictures” [of the carnage] and the whole
mainstream press said “Okay.” There was never any push back.
The American public did not see the pain that was inflicted on
thousands and thousands of families. These were especially heinous
injuries; I mean women had their faces blown off, I mean IEDs, blind
kids, twenty something blind. And we don’t know anything about that.
Bush successfully threw a blanket over the painful coverage, and
media cooperated. I just couldn’t believe that the land of the free
would allow this to happen. And so I said I’m gonna, I nominated myself
to show as many people as I could the pain of this one family, and tried
to make the point that this is just one. There are thousands of other
homes out there; the lives of the entire family are turned upside
down. We’ve never been this close to a catastrophic injury.
This young man, it’s awful. And he recently had pulmonary embolism,
so now his speech is affected and he has to be fed. He cannot hold the
silverware. You know, what’s the sacrifice? Twenty something male,
impotent? I mean, we’ll never be the same, the people who worked on this
film. We saw some PTSD, we saw him struggling, with you know, he can’t,
he’s a smoker, he can’t walk, he can’t get out of bed and get his
cigarettes. …
I picked him up once on an airplane, I had to go and help him off the
airplane. That’s when you. … this is a spiritual experience. That’s
when you realize how powerless, helpless he is, from the chest down he
is a rag doll, and unless somebody comes up with a genome answer to
this, which by the way, the man he fought for, George Bush, would not
approve stem-cell research.
So all these things came colliding down on us and we went ahead with
no script and we, I said “Thomas, I want to show the pain here. I don’t
want to sanitize this at all. But I can’t do it unless you agree.” He
said, “I want to do that too.” So I had his agreement, and off we
went. And here I am.
DB: And it was indeed hard to look at, it was
transformational in nature. And it was only one example of millions of
young people and that’s why I bring this in the context of perhaps of
one more, still, one more war. Imagine, can we take another ten or
fifteen years, another war, with Iran? What does that mean? How do you
respond to that kind of policy? What does that say about where we’re
going?
PD: It says that we live in a nation of law, unless
we’re scared. George Bush with great fanfare talked about democracy,
went around the world “Democracy! Democracy!” and turned his back on the
Bill of Rights. We have people in cages, around the world, no Red
Cross. What is American to us? And while the bedrock of this nation, no
habeas.
You know, you can’t be a proud American and water board somebody. You
can’t be a proud American and deny access to a prisoner. And that’s
what they were doing, because they had to protect us. And the framers,
you know, the Bill of Rights is kind of a quaint, good, interesting idea
but it’s not practical at [this] time. Especially now when you never
know when somebody is going to drop a bomb on us.
This is how they are arguing. And I think it’s how we bombed Grenada,
Grenada! Panama. We bomb people. We drop bombs on crowded cities at
night where old people and children are sleeping. And the American
population watches this on CNN and remain, largely, mute. That’s how we
got here, I think.
DB: And of course, it was a New York Times’
reporter, named Judith Miller, that helped lie us into that war with
Iraq, so that was the paper of record. And I guess I want to focus with
you a little bit on the problems with media. Norm Solomon, of course, is
no stranger. He cut his teeth becoming a very biting, moving, media
critic, holding the corporate media accountable.
Now, you’ve had your own encounters with the corporate media. And
it’s a problem because if people don’t, if we don’t have that Fourth
Estate free and, if you will, questioning the centers of power, then
we’re in trouble. Would you remind people, just very briefly, what
happened to you. We were all very excited, you were starting a new show
on MSNBC, I think it was 2003, a wonderful….
PD: 2002.
DB: 2002. A wonderful producer named Jeff Cohen,
who was a founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, was your
producer. What happened there? It didn’t last long. It was a wonderful
show, but it didn’t last long.
PD: Well, I think we signed on in August [2002] and I
was gone in February of the following year which is a month before the
invasion. MSNBC and its corporate parent, General Electric, were not at
all pleased with my anti-war position. And I was outspoken about it.
And a memo was released, and printed by the New York Times from a
consultant hired by NBC News. “Donahue appears to take delight in his
anti-war stance.” See how we’re marginalized there, “delight.” So I not
only opposed the war, I was, I delighted in. …. I mean what kind of
crass person am I?
They’re so clever. The propaganda campaign that’s been leveled
against the so-called liberal voice. By the way, we’re not liberal
anymore, we’re progressive. We’re actually ashamed of our own name,
liberal. The political idea that dare not speak its name.
So, I just, I noticed that the more I got into this the more I
realized what I had learned from Norman. How easy it is to go to war,
especially if you have corporate media on your side. And you can bet,
that if there is another war, corporate media will be on the side of the
establishment. It’s not good for business to oppose a war.
People who oppose wars are scolds, nobody likes a scold. They are
crabby, they don’t love America. And how can you oppose a war when a
president is ramping up for one? You embarrass the president in front of
the world, and the people that we’re trying to overcome here, and
you’re disrespectful to the troops.
So we’ve sent how many thousands and thousands of Americans to fight
for our freedom, including free speech, and when we need it the most, at
a time when a president [is starting a war], we have millions of people
in this country who believe it’s unpatriotic to not support the
president. That’s why, that’s how war is made easy. It’s amazing.
And then if you, if you scare the people you can move an entire
population. George Bush took this nation by the ear and led it into the
sword, and we let it happen. It’s amazing what you can do if you scare
the people. And corporate media will always be on the side of whatever
the White House wants to do. They don’t want anybody mad.
I mean imagine the money that General Electric makes out of just
these defense contracts. And Donahue is on the air making fun of
[Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld. It’s counterintuitive for them to
want to have me on their television program. When the board of directors
went to their country clubs I am sure their golf buddies said “What the
hell are you doing with Donahue on the…?”
And this is, this is 2002. The Iraq War resolution was October 2002,
this was less than a year from the [9/11] towers. And Bush called for
the Iraq resolution two weeks before an election. Only 23 senators voted
“No.” Twenty-three. [One-hundred-and-thirty-three] House members voted
“No.” This resolution passed overwhelmingly on lies. It wasn’t
true. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and there are, I’m betting
you, I can’t prove this, there are millions and millions of Americans
who today, believe he did.
DB: I’m sure to this day, and of course, we’re
concerned because the same kind of media machine is cranking us up for
another war. It is interesting to me what happened in journalism, and I
do want to get your feedback on this.
The great Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, who actually reports for an
Israeli newspaper in the West Bank, talks, when you ask her “What’s the
job of a journalist?” She says, “To monitor the centers of power,
whether they be in the government, in the corporation, in the local
politicians. It’s our job as the Fourth Estate, to monitor the centers
of power.” But now it seems that the media has become its own center of
power. How would you define what happened here?
PD: With the war?
DB: And the role that the journalists seem to play
in fanning the flames as opposed to reporting about what exactly is the
situation.
PD: Well, there’s almost a worship of people in power. You never see a peace worker or leader on Meet the Press. The
established journalists cover established power. … You know, I thought
journalists could take all kinds of criticism because they dish so much
of it out and I was wrong. They bleat and they pout. And they never
forget you if you say something, so I don’t mean to be swinging
round-house bar room generalities here. But … how else can we explain
the surrender of … the reporters [at a] Rumsfeld briefing.
So did the so-called expert generals, defense people on CNN and the
other channels…. I mean this was so managed and the press made it
happen. One of the few journalists that I admire who doesn’t care if the
White House calls them back is Sy Hersh. And I’m sure you’ve
interviewed and you know you won’t see him on Meet the Press. …
DB: And it’s not because he wouldn’t accept the invitation. He’s not going to get the invitation.
PD: That’s what I mean. That’s exactly true. And we
gotta somehow fix this. mainstream media, like the American public, as I
say, if you criticize a president ramping up for war you’re
unpatriotic, you don’t believe in God. They have got it, and you don’t.
That’s the coup de grace.
And as long as that kind of drum beat against … this “tax and spend,
tax and spend!” I mean they have blistered us. We’ve changed our name,
we’re no longer liberal. That’s how brilliant it has been this strategy
of marginalization. You don’t understand it, you liberals! You never
saw a problem you don’t want to spend my money to fix. You don’t
understand the geopolitical rah, rah, rah. They’ve got all kinds of
things they’re going to nail you with.
You go to war [and] if you criticize it, they’re mad. If you
criticize it after we go to war, you don’t respect the troops. If you
criticize it after we lose troops, you’re defiling the memory of these
troops and you are spitting in the face of their loved ones and their
parents. I mean from everywhere, and by the way, you can’t say “Why did
they crash into the towers?” Because then you’re blaming the victim.
At every turn they are ready for you, and you better shut up and sing
or they’re going to make life miserable for you and if you’re thirty
something, with two and a half kids and a mortgage, and reporting to a
Republican boss, you know, how much of an outspoken dissenter are you
going to be? Everything conspires to open the door wide for a president
to march through it with his cruise missiles, his aircraft carriers. …
I think the greatest thing that Obama could do now is call a press
conference and say “We are here, now and hereafter not going to use
drones for military assault. We may want to reserve the right to keep
them for surveillance but we are promising the world now that we
won’t….”
Where is the valor? A guy sits in a cage or a control room somewhere
in Maryland or maybe Nevada and he sees in the nose cone camera of the
unmanned aerial vehicle, there’s the insurgents, how they know, I’m not
sure, and they fire an incendiary device, and we kill children,
children! And this is on Obama’s watch.
You know, I don’t see how anybody who engages in this kind of killing
can claim to be brave. You know, Grenada. We bombed a mental
hospital. We don’t have ground troops to go in and take care of Morris
Bishop, the communist? And the endangered lives of those medical
students? We don’t have to bomb people. It’s just easier. I’m convinced
of this. And I also have this totally unassailable position that bombing
should be a war crime.
You know, if a Marine goes into a Fallujah home and blows away the
family with an AK47 that’s a war crime. If we drop a bomb on that house
and incinerate the family, it’s collateral damage. We are in denial. And
we are creating language to help us continue to be in denial. This is
awful.
We are endangering the lives of our young adult children or the
future military. My grandchildren, what kind of a world are they going
to live in? Are they going to keep looking over their shoulder in
downtown New York City or Fargo, North Dakota? Are they going to be
saying, “Did I just get on the wrong bus?” Do we really expect that we
can drop bombs like this and not have to pay a price for this?
We have executed an American citizen in a foreign land and we
assassinated him with a drone. We are endangering our political, and
military and mostly our political leadership. You can’t keep doing
this. For them to stand there and let this happen forever is
counterintuitive.
DB: Before we get to Norman, I, in this context of
war and peace and courage, about telling the truth, I have to ask you
about a private by the name of Bradley Manning. Who the government, the
military wants to put in jail forever, who spent a great deal of time in
jail. Just had his first hearing and some people think he should be
executed for revealing some of the things that you were talking about
including a film that showed a U.S. helicopter crew gunning down
civilians, including children. Your thoughts on Bradley Manning? Is he a
hero or a traitor?
PD: In a time in the history of this nation, when
there is so much happening under the table, when administrations feel
they have to protect us, and in order to do that efficiently they have
to keep it secret, I celebrate the courage of Bradley Manning. I’ve yet
to see anybody prove to anybody else that somebody was killed because of
whatever it is that Bradley Manning has made public.
You know, the information is the life blood of a democracy. I believe
there are more victims caused by secrecy than there are by
sunshine. So let’s have the disinfectant there. Let’s have Julian
Assange [WikiLeaks founder]. … What has been revealed is helpful. It’s
gonna help. … It raises the possibility that it won’t happen again. And
that’s a good thing.
And we can argue all night, you know, the next thing they’re going to
bring in the family of the CIA agent who was killed, and how can you
do. … They are ready for any kind of dissent, they will slap you
down. They will hit you hard. You can’t even get your sentence out. One
of the, the writers, a female writer, shortly after 9/11 wrote a column
that said “The chickens have come home to roost.” And Charles
Krauthammer took her head off. She was blaming the victim.
So you can’t even inquire “Why did they do this?” Another attempt to
sort of say “Hold it. Hold it.” is shut off. And they have
succeeded. They have succeeded. They have scared us enough where they
have made us believe, not everybody to be sure, but they’ve made enough
people believe that they need this secrecy otherwise they can’t protect
us and that is a very difficult thing for an American citizen to oppose.
DB: I know that you’re in town to support the
candidacy of Norman Solomon. He’s running for Congress on the Democratic
Party which in a district that was reprogrammed, if you will. That
covers the Golden Gate Bridge all the way to the border, up north with
Oregon. And it’s a very important district. Some significant people have
come out for him, Dan Ellsberg, Delores Huerta, and Elliott Gould was
just in town. You are here now. Tell us why you’ve come here, why you
would support somebody like Norman Solomon. What do you know about him?
You know enough about him to believe in him?
PD: Well, I think so. First of all, we both made
documentaries, with the same point of view. And when we each saw, when
we saw each others documentaries, it was like a brotherhood, you
know? And I admired also what he had to say in his book. His analysis of
how we go to war and what … collectively pushes [us] into these
horrible “Don’t mess with Texas” foreign policy decisions. It’s much
more detailed.
Norman does something that I haven’t seen anybody else do, and that
is get behind this. We have a national press corps that wants to know
who’s winning and who’s losing, and where we have the bases and how much
equipment …. without ever asking “Why the hell are we doing this in the
first place?” Norman does that. And he does it in a very professional
way.
His scholarship is impeccable. He’s the son my mother wanted to
have. And I admire him so much because, you know, I’m out there high
wire, you know, trying to make my contribution to the peace movement and
when I am out there, I think of Norman and I steal from him, I do. But I
always quote his book. Norman, he makes the point, a president of the
United States can have a war if he wants one. That is terrifying. That
is so frightening.
You know look at Ron Paul, now here’s a guy I’m not able to vote
for. There is a history that is very distracting for me, but he’s going
around the campaign saying “Why are we always doing these wars? Why are
we invading other people?” No other candidate on either side of the
aisle can speak those words.
DB: And he’s getting support for it.
PD: Yes, he is. He’s getting a lot of young
people. Can you imagine Mitt Romney saying “What are we doing in all
these wars?” Can’t be done, because if they turn out to be wrong or
unpopular, whatever it is, it’s politically fatal. They’re finished in
the public service business. They will not be re-elected to Congress.
Imagine the most important issue right in front of us, some would
argue it’s the economy, and it may be. But right now when you think of
all this military action going on and all the bombs we’ve dropped and
all the countries we’ve invaded, what is more important to you as an
issue in a presidential race? And it’s off the table. That’s how we go
to war. There is no robust debate about this.
Rick Santorum can’t wait to invade Iran. He’s ready to send another
4,000 Americans to die. And he’s doing it because he knows that the way
you get elected is you gotta be tough. And a president, if you give a
president a cruise missile, he’ll fire. You know, it just, it blows me
away when I see how easily we are seduced into a war and all of a
sudden, we have widows getting the folded flag, people are crying around
the coffin, young men and women are coming home. They’ll never see a
child graduate, they’ll never go to a bar mitzvah, or first
communion. They are irreplaceable human beings, and they are dead
forever, because George Bush wanted to “Bring it on!” And now we’ve got
Rick Santorum.
Boy, you can see … a president doesn’t get a statue for fixing health
care. The only way you get a statue in a park is winning a war. That’s
why we’ve got horses and swords; we have military airplanes in parks
that kids play on. We’ve cannons in parks, in parks! We celebrate war.
There’s no other way to say this.
And how the American people can stand there and allow this to happen,
there is a connection. If we create a culture surrounded by things that
go “Boom” we can’t be surprised if we build our foreign policy on that
kind of activity.
DB: In conclusion, and Norman and I have gone back
and forth one this, I asked him for an article that I did about him for
the Progressive, “Why would you give up this role, this very important
role as a biting media critic to go into a swamp land called Congress,
where nobody, very few people, say what they mean, there are a few of
them. But won’t we lose this important media critic if he ends up in the
swamp of Congress?”
PD: Here’s what I think about that. We’re very close
to cynicism with that observation. What good does it do? By the way,
everybody hates Congress. And it doesn’t take a lot of courage to hate
Congress. It’s easy to hate 535 people. And I’ve never found that
criticism to have much weight. You know, what do you mean? What is it
you don’t like about Congress? They won’t answer you. Congress is
politicians, we hate politicians.
I think Norman’s decision is exemplary. I’d like to see more people
like Norman. It’s an act of courage today to jump into this thing, I
agree with you. I don’t know how you have any fun with all the whacko
business that’s going on in Washington. … Don’t you miss Donald Trump? I
mean seriously this is, this was the greatest reality show. …
What we want is sunshine, as long as it’s out there. As long as your
listeners have an opportunity to hear them, don’t let anybody be so
protective and paternalistic where they get themselves in a position
where “Well, we know what’s good for you.” Now we’ve become the thing we
hate. Which by the way, has what’s happened in foreign policy. We are
killing innocent people.
When I was on MSNBC I had people on from Peaceful Tomorrows. These
were citizens who lost family, loved ones in the towers. And they call
us and their message was, “don’t go and kill other innocent people to
avenge the death of my innocent father, or grandfather,” whatever it
was. I could see the pain in their faces across, and this was another
example of moral courage. Imagine these people got up in the middle of
the war fever, and made this point.
Of course, they were ignored. But what’s most interesting to me is
that these people are not alone. You know, right now most people agree
with us. You know, we’re going to have to get used to this. We’re
popular. But I guess we weren’t popular enough in 2003 when we invaded,
but even then there were millions of Americans who opposed the war but
they were never heard, they were never heard. Mainstream media, went
along, to go along.
DB: Well, finally so to be clear here Phil Donahue,
in your heart of hearts, you really believe that somebody like Norman
Solomon can make a difference? Is that what you believe?
PD: You know if I don’t believe that, then I’m a
cynic, and my voice has ended, I no longer, if I think, how many times
have you heard, “Oh, what does it matter, they’re going to go to war
anyway.” I mean I’ve heard that so many times, you know, wars just
happen. … I mean that’s a surrender. …
I mean we’ve got to start somewhere, Dennis. I mean, if Norman
doesn’t, whose going to do it? … I think he’d be a great example for
other progressives to follow him into the public arena of Washington,
D.C. and be a break on this rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ foreign policy that
presidents and others in power seem to believe will make them
heroes. [Vice President Dick] Cheney looked at Bush at a cabinet meeting
[and asked] “You gonna take him out, or not?” Imagine that. This is
cowboy talk.
And it may involve your son, or daughter, who will come home in a
pine box, when the two officers walk up the front walk and the mother
looks out the window, they often faint, before these men get to the
front door. This is the pain that the American people are not seeing,
and I made this one little attempt with the movie titled “Body of War”
to at least expose the sacrifice of one family.
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