Donahue a Disaster

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By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid September 13, 2002 We thought that liberal talk show host Phil Donahue might have a chance with his new show on MSNBC if he reached out to conservatives and gave them an opportunity to state their case. Instead, his program has degenerated into conspiracy theories about 9/11, diatribes from leftist film maker Michael Moore, and an interview with Vladimir Posner, Donahue’s old sidekick and mouthpiece for the USSR.

Donahue himself went down to Texas to do a show with former Enron employees. One of the guests was Ralph Nader, himself a millionaire who had been a big investor in high-tech. But the interview with Moore showed what’s really wrong with the show. Both Donahue and Moore are very well-off and yet they claim to represent the little guy who lost his shirt in the corporate scandals. People don’ buy it.

Joe Fairbanks of the Stanford Review said, "In fact, multi-millionaire Michael Moore is to ‘working class’ as French is to resistance." Moore, a multi-millionaire who says, "I'm filthy rich," has a best-selling book, Stupid White Men, and his films have made him wealthy. But he sometimes wears a baseball cap to appear like the average guy. David Harsanyi writes that, "Despite his open hatred of the rich, Moore has few qualms about aping an authentic capitalist, peddling his new book on seemingly all news, entertainment and radio shows running." Moore used the Donahue show as a soapbox against President Bush, calling him a "clown" because he told a business forum that he had been on the job for eighteen months and still hadn’t figured out how the federal budget works.

That’s refreshing honesty from the President. It’s too bad that Moore and Donahue aren’t as concerned about federal budget shenanigans as they are about corporate fraud. It’s true that some Americans lost their Enron pensions, but many more Americans stand to lose their Social Security and Medicare benefits because these federal programs are going bankrupt.

Following Moore, Donahue interviewed black racist Louis Farrakhan for an entire hour. Among other things, Farrakhan claimed that the U.S. Government introduced crack cocaine into the black community and made AIDS the number one killer of black people in American and Africa. "And I’m not saying something as an insane radical," Farrakhan said. Donahue had no rebuttal for this.

Asked by a viewer and caller why the black children or grandchildren of slaves should get reparations from whites who didn’t own slaves, Farrakhan brought up the trial of black football star O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife and a friend. Most observers thought Simpson avoided a guilty verdict by having clever lawyers who made police conduct the issue and accused them of racism. Farrakhan said that "he won in the criminal court and they found him not guilty, but they tried him again and they found him responsible." It wasn’t clear how this related to reparations, and whether Farrakhan really thought Simpson was innocent of that crime, but Donahue let it pass. This kind of thing went on for an hour. No wonder Donahue is losing viewers.

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2002


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