DEMOCRACY NOW INTERVIEWS PHIL DONAHUE

From, of course, Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you go from here? And do you think that you'll be speaking out more on media consolidation?

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, I haven't -- I haven't necessarily been totally silent, but it's certainly true that I – you know, this gets your attention. I have said -- I say I am so spoiled. I very much enjoy popping off about these issues. And reading about the people, like yourself, who have been -- become aware and truly insightful about how important -- I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered, how could the United States have -- I don't have any more confusion about that. I realize what you can do when you scare the population and how media contributes to that. And all of these young men who died on foreign battlefields to protect our way of life, and at the center of that is dissent. Not to dissent is to waste their sacrifice. Don't tell us to shut up. Don't take our flag; this is our flag. I mean, these people have -- with the megaphone of the White House, have obviously convinced a significant number of people that they have God and we don't.

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I've loved Donahue since I was a kid. I'm not really sure what it was that made him interesting to me--I didn't really like any other talk shows when I was young. Perhaps it was his overwhelming sense of personal charisma; perhaps it was his ability to make controversial topics understandable to the masses. Perhaps, even then, I loved controversy. I don't know. Years later, I finally realized just how liberal he is at around the time I was realizing just how liberal I am. Then they canceled his show. I was really excited when MSNBC brought him back and he started bashing Bush's war plans. Then they canceled that show, despite the fact that it was the network's highest rated program: obviously network executives couldn't handle having an anti-war voice while the drums of war were beating so loudly on all the other networks. This interview is the first I've heard from him since then.

It's a great interview, by the way, but maybe I'm biased because he's such a hero to me. I want to be just like him when I grow up. Wait, I am grown up. So maybe I am just like him. Maybe.

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