Billo, Keith, and the joy of show business feuds
The Olbermann-O'Reilly feud isn't over. It just went on hiatus.
Back in the 1930s, columnist Walter Winchell initiated a feud with his friend Ben Bernie, who was an up-and-coming bandleader. "Bernie insulted Winchell on the air; Winchell replied in kind," wrote John Dunning in his great Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. "When a joint appearance was arranged at the Paramount, they played to overflow crowds." The feud increased the fame of both men. They even bickered through a movie in 1937 called “Love and Hisses.” That was the same year that Jack Benny and Fred Allen culminated their long-running radio feud with the Battle of the Century broadcast sponsored by Jell-O.
From Jack and Fred back then to Ryan and Joel today, there's nothing like an out-of-control showbiz feud. I love them -- probably because one got me into in the career I'm in now. When I began writing about television, it was out of a conviction that David Letterman had been wronged by his former employer and that Jay Leno had stolen Johnny’s throne from Dave. I’ve mellowed my stance over the years, but there’s no denying that the backstage feud between the Leno and Letterman camps, as chronicled in Bill Carter’s splendid 1993 book The Late Shift, motivated me to start my little newsletter that proved my inadvertent entry into journalism.
Most feuds, like Letterman-Leno, are initiated by one side, which does most of the hitting. They can be entertaining as well, but you run the risk of letting your anger take over. Twenty years after Ben Bernie, Winchell -- whose column was in decline -- got beaten up savagely by Jack Paar on the "Tonight Show." Paar could not let go of his unhappiness at items about himself that showed up in Winchell’s gossip column. Paar's habit of feuding with columnists was criticized, but they did underscore his reputation as a volatile, unpredictable force ... not a person with mental illness, as his sidekick Hugh Downs once joked, but a carrier. And you can’t argue that was bad for business.
Now comes word, courtesy of Brian Stelter at the New York Times, that another famous feud is allegedly ending. Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly have been ordered to stop maligning each other because “their bosses have had enough.” Stelter reports that in May, media-titan schmoozer and nightly gasbag Charlie Rose got the bosses together at a CEO summit and helped them carve out a mutual silencing of their feuding anchors.
The news spurred outrage among lefties and liberals at the idea that Olbermann would no longer be able to call attention to O’Reilly’s commentaries that he (and they) found inaccurate, indecent and intolerable. After all, ending this feud would essentially be a victory for O'Reilly, who let himself get sucked into it and was now being offered, in Henry Kissinger's phrase, "peace with honor."
(By the way, I still hear from delusionary Fox News junkies the fiction that O’Reilly “rarely” or “never” talks about Keith Olbermann. In the next breath they usually include rather precise information about the “Factor’s” Nielsen ratings. [It regularly beats “Countdown” by 3-to-1 and 4-to-1 in total viewers, though Billo’s average viewer is so old that MSNBC is at least competitive in the 25-54 demographic.] Well, where do you think they get that information? From Billo, of course! O’Reilly has made countless references to NBC, GE and its CEO Jeff Immelt, and they are all spurred by one man, the successor to Phil Donahue’s time slot. Now that was a memorable segment, O’Reilly trying to start a petition drive to bring back Donahue. Even Billo’s boss Rupert Murdoch acknowledged last year that O’Reilly has let Olbermann’s taunting get under his skin.)
Anyway, Stelter now reports that the feud is over. With all due respect to Brian, who does a terrific job and is a great guy ... I’m not buying it.
I don't think Brian got the facts wrong. The central nugget of the story is juicy and, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out today in Salon, makes Charlie Rose look like an even bigger tool than before. I just think the conclusion Brian drew from the facts was a wild miss.
Sure, the titans of the two respective conglomerates sat down and tried to hammer out a truce. But there is no linkage between that meeting and subsequent actions at MSNBC. It's equally plausible that when they caught wind of the CEO summit, they chose to ignore it, or told the big boss, "Keith said he's stopped attacking Billo," which is technically true (as we'll get to in a moment), but which also leaves the door open for those attacks to resume. Yeah, yeah, a GE spokesman said something on the record to Stelter but (a) that looks to me like one of those if-you-say-it’s-true reaction quotes that we’ve all run in our stories occasionally and, more to the point, (b) Olbermann denied it. “I am party to no deal,” KO emailed Stelter. And if he is party to no deal, then ... no deal. Right?
It is true that Olbermann said on the air he would stop referencing Billo. But here is the context in which he said it (you can skip over the first 73 seconds of teasers):
KO isn’t declaring peace, he’s declaring cease-fire. He’s apparently decided that he’s dished out enough abuse in the last four years that even the densest “Countdown” viewer can see that Factorman is a buffoon and a threat to democracy. Fine. Now he wants his viewers to join his crusade, take up their mantles and go after all bars, restaurants and waiting rooms that dare to show Fox News. This editorial aired June 1 in the wake of abortionist George Tiller's murder. I’m not aware that KO’s call to action has caught on. Frankly, it sounds a bit like O’Reilly’s cockamamie crusade to bring back Phil Donahue.
My point is: If this is how Olbermann calls off a feud under orders from Jeff Immelt, that’s a helluva way to do it.
I believe that the Billo-Keith feud is, like “Grey’s Anatomy,” on hiatus, and will return someday with new episodes. And boy, I can’t wait for that. It’s one of my favorite shows!
Previously on TVB, I spotted an artifact of the Joel McHale-Ryan Seacrest feud (pictured above) backstage at the "Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien."
