Of Phil Donahue and Joe Rogan: Leaning into the Shrug and Carrying On

Phil Donahue on the set of his show, with Rush Limbaugh in the background, 1991. Photo by Eddie~S, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The evenings of my childhood included watching Made for TV movies, and our family had only one television.  It was a wood-clad Zenith, and could have doubled as a barge anchor.  Everyone watched What Dad Watched, which is to say that television programming at the time was geared towards adults.  Roots, Lonesome Dove, North & South, and various evening dramas where Ricky Schroeder was cast as a troubled or victimized teenager were very common.  My whole family watched together, while sharing a couple of glass bottles of pop and munching popcorn out of a melamine mixing bowl.

For a while, we had Showtime which played movies all day long.  I think I watched The Blue Lagoon at least forty-seven times.  I don’t recall my parents being overly concerned about the nudity (of basically children) in the movie, but I do remember being scolded to put the little lever-stopper back on the pop bottle lest the carbonation escape before the Friday night feature.  Lea Thompson’s boobs and Tom Cruise’s pre-cosmetic dentistry in All the Right Moves was a favorite right alongside Sophie’s Choice.  To summarize the dramatic television experience of my youth, it was: “man vs. nature,” “man’s inhumanity to man,” and “man vs. boobs” but largely unsupervised or uncensored.

There were only two things I recall my parents ever explicitly forbidding me to watch while I lived at home:  Jerry Springer, because my mother declared that the whole premise exploited poor people–who were ignorant of their own exploit–for entertainment, and the video to Bon Jovi’s “Living in Sin” because it conflated the act of congress with receiving the Sacrament of Holy Communion.  But never Nazis, and never boobs.

We moved to the country when I was in the sixth grade and it was at this point that our TV only carried what the antenna would draw in.  My parents told us that we were “so far out of town that we couldn’t get cable.”  I was 37 and a mother myself before it dawned on me that my parents had lied:  they just didn’t want to pay the cable bill anymore and figured we were watching too much TV.  I made a note of their tactics for future reference with my own progeny.

The move limited our TV watching to just four channels, and that meant Phil Donahue became a frequent after-school-but-before-dad-came-home companion.  He wasn’t my favorite, a bit boring and too serious, but from my childhood perspective, Donahue addressed issues of gravitas and societal problems in a matter-of-fact way.  He included politicians and celebrities as guests, but often touched on controversies of the time like breakdancing, “transvestites,” AIDS, and real members of the KKK.  I didn’t get the sense that he felt a need to label any of the guests or ideas “good” or “bad,” but he was very willing to let the studio audience and viewers figure things out for themselves.  And they did. I did.

Celebrities and politicians running for election went on the Donahue show; they didn’t avoid it entirely just because it occasionally included people like Phyllis Schafley, Joseph Mengele’s son, and male strippers.  Donahue was just a guy who talked about a variety of interesting things and presented those topics in a way that laid them bare for what they were.  He drew a line between trying to inform and trying to convince.  And he did it for nearly thirty years.

Was Donahue a prominent feature of my formative years?  Not really.  He was as significant as nudity on Showtime, the victimization of children as a frequent made-for-tv storyline, and the Iran-Contra hearings.  Certainly there, but not pivotal.  My parents took care to never elevate what a celebrity pundit or “the media” would cover above the values which were instilled in our home.  A general shrug followed by carrying on to more important matters was enough to indicate the lack of significance in the topic at hand.

Phil Donahue was a pioneer of daytime television, paving the way for people like Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams, Maury Povich, and Rikki Lake.  His format was interactive, entertaining, and fairly intellectual, but it was eventually squeezed out of favor by talk shows that traded his high-road approach for tabloid appeal. The Donahue show, which at one time commanded daily viewership of between 8 and 11-million people, was cancelled in 1996.  While I don’t think that could fairly be called cancel culture, it certainly was the free market.

It occurs to me that the daytime talk show was also the precursor to the contemporary podcast.  Today, however, the current media landscape is much wider than an AM/FM dial and four channels coaxed in with an antenna.   Talk shows and podcasts both rely on discussing something of interest, typically interview guests, and include some form of audience interaction.  Both would fail to entertain if they only discussed topics everyone agreed upon or featured issues that no one cared to investigate more.  Confoundingly though, as the media landscape has widened to include content via Youtube, Spotify, and other Socials, the marketplace of ideas seems to have grown less tolerant and more reactionary.  Certainly less tolerant and more reactionary than my mid-western conservative parents of thirty-five years ago who employed the shrug and carry-on approach.

Which makes me wonder: what makes Joe Rogan different than Phil Donahue?  Why is a podcast that includes people who don’t trust covid vaccines more controversial than a talk show featuring both a self-proclaimed Nazi and holocaust survivors?  Would Neil Young have declined to be a musical guest on David Letterman decades ago because NBC also carried Donahue?  No, because he didn’t.  Neil Young also did a full interview with Howard Stern—Howard Stern—in 2021!  Howard Stern has been entertaining—and offending people–long before Rogan entered the scene with Fear Factor.  How is Stern somehow less problematic than Rogan?  Maybe Neil Young deserves cancelling because he sat for an interview with a shock-jock known to utter the N-word and appear in blackface.  Or maybe Rogan just needs to book Young for an interview and put this whole thing to bed.

For the record, I don’t think anyone deserves “cancelling” because it’s a race to the bottom once it starts.  It is only a matter of time before Neil Young’s statements, behavior, and past associations offend someone.  While Young is at best guilty of situational inconsistency, he’s at worst advocating for the marketplace of ideas to be cleansed of ideas he personally finds intolerable.  I wish Neil Young and artists ascribing to this approach could have more faith in their own art to inform and inspire and stop pretending they are arbitrators of the public square.  Or at least take cue from my parents and resist over-reacting to it.  After all, the proof is in the pudding:  I somehow avoided becoming a Nazi or a male stripper.

In the meantime, its worth considering the dangers of allowing the platforming of controversy to become controversial.  This robs society of a chance— and the obligation–to confront wanton ideas with better ones.  And it tricks people into assuming everything they’re presented with is legitimate simply because its presented, as though it’s passed The Neil Young & Friends Acceptability Test or otherwise arbitrary threshold.   Maybe that is where Rogan falls short.   Perhaps its impossible for a guy who got his start cajoling contestants into eating goat gonads or fermented snake eggs to be perceived as doing anything other than legitimizing the beliefs of the snake-handlers of our time.  Because some of those beliefs are no less ridiculous as ingesting goat gonads for money, and millions of people ate that up.

It is entirely possible to highlight the shortcomings the cancel culture approach without becoming a fan or even casual consumer of The Joe Rogan Experience.  Personally, I’ve never experienced a single episode, though via the whiplash of Young’s principled stand, I’ve encountered plenty of clips which force me to question whether Mr. Young is aware of the Streisand Effect.  I think that is what I miss: the restraint of my upbringing and a decades-gone society.  The ability to resist weighing in with agreement, condemnation, outrage, or judgement, and discovering a certain virtue through apathy.  While it’s fair to question whether Joe Rogan’s podcast is much different than The Phil Donahue Show, there is a glaringly obvious way that Phil Donahue was never Joe Rogan:  Media never became The Story.   While we may have lost the ability to shrug and carry on, I’d like to think Phil probably still can.