Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 21, 1935, Donahue’s first brush with the broadcasting industry came after his junior year at Notre Dame, where he was studying business when he accepted a summer job at WNDU, a local station owned by the university. After graduating, he began working as a fill-in announcer at other local radio/television outlets before landing jobs as a program director at a Michigan station and at WHIO-AM-TV in Dayton, where he interviewed the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and hosted a radio talk show called “Conversation Piece.” Although his frustrations with not being able to land national-level work caused him to briefly leave broadcasting to work for a stamp trading company, he returned to it in 1967 with a new morning talk show in Dayton titled “The Phil Donahue Show,” which would change the history of television forever.
Back then, as now, most of the major talk shows aired from New York or Los Angeles, because that was where the personalities you expected to see sitting on the couch would congregate. Dayton, on the other hand, has never been known for being a media spotlight, and getting those personalities on a plane to Ohio to appear on a talk show to promote their new movies was simply impossible. Recognizing this, Donahue eventually rejiggered the format in a way that would allow him to make the best use of his limited resources. Rather than scrambling to recruit the usual two or three guests per show, each speaking on his or her particular topic, he would devote each episode to focusing on a single guest and topic. These topics would mostly avoid the typical talk show frothiness in favor of more serious topics that reflected the increasingly tumultuous times. Perhaps most significantly, he transformed his studio audiences from passive to active participants, including them in the proceedings by coming out to their seats to elaborate on their thoughts on the topic at hand or having them pose their own questions to the guests.
From the very first episode (which featured Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the famous atheist who had just helped lead the case that led the Supreme Court to ban prayer in schools), the show was a hotbed of controversy. It dealt with previously forbidden topics such as premarital sex, prison reform, homosexuality, and other social, political, and cultural issues of the day. The show was also an instant hit, and in 1969 it was relaunched in national syndication. By 1971 it could be seen on 44 stations across the country, and in 1974 the show moved its base of operations to Chicago, where it was renamed “Donahue” and produced at WGN's studio facility and would soon be absorbed by the upstart syndicator Multimedia Program Productions.