What Makes a Good Modern Feud?
The great modern feud-maker, Bill O’Reilly (AP)
When Mother Jones published an article alleging that Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly had exaggerated his war-zone reporting experience — and thus has a “Brian Williams problem” — writers David Corn and Daniel Schulman must have been hoping for a takedown, or maybe an apology.
What they got was a feud.
O’Reilly is an excellent feuder. There’s no mincing words or feints at professional respect for his critics. He’s a guns-blazing kind of guy. He’s feuded with everyone from Keith Olbermann to Al Sharpton. He’s a feud-maker. (Although I’m guessing he’d dispute that, naturally.)
This current feud is actually worth breaking down, because it helps illustrate what makes for a great modern feud. So, in the spirit of TV series recaps, here’s what’s happened so far:
O’Reilly offered his response to Mother Jones the evening after its report. This included an actual rebuttal, but what was far more noteworthy was the feudin’ language: He called Corn a “liar” and “guttersnipe” who “smeared me”; declared Mother Jones to be at the “bottom rung” of journalism; and then offered the entire incident as “proof the American media is corrupt.” (Apropos of not much, he also dredged up an old feud with Al Franken: The consummate feuder never lets bygones be bygones.)
Corn responded to the response with an “annotated” and “fact-checked” version of O’Reilly’s remarks. Among other things, it noted an interview in which O’Reilly said that when the dust settles on this feud he will not only be vindicated, but: “I expect David Corn to be in the kill zone. Where he deserves to be.” Mother Jones promptly “asked O’Reilly to renounce this remark and apologize for responding in a violent tone.” (O’Reilly later replied that this was merely “slang.”) In an interview with the Huffington Post, Corn further condemned O’Reilly’s “bombast and name-calling,” accusing his foe of resorting to “smears, invective, insults.” His Twitter feed has hammered away at O’Reilly relentlessly.
The feud was definitely on — but turned out to be just the beginning. Today’s feuds are interactive and participatory: Through the magic of social media, anybody can leap into the fray — and possibly escalate it. In the O’Reilly incident, a former CBS correspondent named Eric Jon Engberg materialized on the scene with a lengthy Facebook post (or “extensive rant,” as the Washington Post called it), questioning the account given by O’Reilly and labeling him a “Fox News bloviater.”
The feud-ready cable news circuit welcomed this development: On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Engberg told host Brian Stelter that a version of events O’Reilly offered a few years ago was “a fabrication, a lie.”
O’Reilly immediately added Engberg to his feudee list, in a testy appearance on Howard Kurtz’s Fox show #Mediabuzz. (Yes, the show has a hashtag in the name.) In the course of dismissing Engberg, O’Reilly said that the former correspondent’s nickname was “Room Service Eric.”
CBS has since released footage of the disputed coverage at the heart of the feud. This has done nothing to resolve the matter. To the contrary, O’Reilly seems poised to escalate yet again, reportedly telling a New York Times writer that if he deemed the paper’s coverage unfair, “I am coming after you with everything I have. You can take it as a threat.”
The modern feud
There’s nothing new about feuds, of course — there was that whole Hatfield/McCoy thing, for instance — but this one happens to be an excellent example of the 21st-century version of the form: It’s mean, it’s multimedia, it’s multiplatform, it gins up attention for all participants, and it resolves nothing.
It’s also pretty entertaining. Social media tools have helped increase the raw number of feuds, as well as the ease with which the peanut gallery can leap into the scrum. The always-on traditional media, with its thirst for anything resembling conflict, helps too.
Plus, the modern media feud has proven a flexible form, accommodating any two (or more) people with some sort of following in pretty much any public field who disagree about almost anything. Even as O’Reilly feuded with Mother Jones, one of the hottest videos on YouTube — with 1.8 million views in a couple of days — involved rappers Chris Brown and Tyga expounding on their feud with Drake. (Technically they referred to it as their “beef,” but that’s close enough for our purposes here.) If that doesn’t interest you, maybe you followed frequent feuder Mark Cuban’s fleeting squabble with a YouTube co-founder.
The point is, there’s a feud for every niche in our fractured media culture: Celebrity feuds, political feuds, sports star feuds. Evidently one thing we can all agree on is an interest in strident disagreements carried out publicly.
I’m not proud to admit it, but I sort of enjoy a good feud. I know they rarely add to public discourse, and sometimes detract from it. And I know that the people involved are actual human beings who may truly find their feuding painful.
Still, I would suggest three positive attributes of a quality feud. The first is that, as entertainment, a top-notch feud can develop into a pleasing little narrative — a miniature passion play that rewards close reading. The second is that, from time to time, a feud can be genuinely revealing — often by accident, as a result of one party losing his or her cool.
And even when that doesn’t happen, the third element holds true: Feuds tend to be almost jarringly honest. In a media world ruled by artifice and persona, that’s a rare thing, and worth a little attention now and then.
Old-school feuds
You could start a history of feuds with Cain and Abel, if you wish, but I’m going to leap ahead to feuds in the mass media era. Early television enabled a sort of Golden Age of Feuds that was a surprisingly highbrow affair, and which almost always involved the author Gore Vidal. There was Gore Vidal vs. Norman Mailer. Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley. Gore Vidal vs. Truman Capote. There were also possibly some other examples that didn’t involve Gore Vidal.
But let’s stick with Vidal anyway, because he was a brilliant feuder. While his Mailer-baiting is more famous, his tangle with the conservative thinker Buckley was actually better: Vidal once dismissed an argument by calling Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” which so rattled his opponent that the latter sputteringly resorted to calling him a “queer” and threatened to “sock you in the goddamn face.” Even delivered through a clenched patrician accent, this had the distinct sound of a genteel façade shattering. Excellent feud moment.
Today, obviously, the feud has been democratized, and rank name-calling and the like is more commonplace. Many public figures, in fact, appear to have social media accounts wired directly to their id. Rap artist Azealia Banks feuds with all sorts of people. And a surprising number of people seem determined to feud with rapper Iggy Azalea (who herself once started a beef with Papa John’s). Naturally, the two have feuded extensively with each other — to the point that each may now be better known for feuding than for making music.
But every so often a feud brings moments of authentic surprise. When journalism professor Marc Cooper took to Facebook to accuse the New York Times of “cowardice” for deciding not to publish the Charlie Hebdo images that preceded the murderous attack on that satirical magazine’s office, the paper’s top editor concluded his terse response by calling Cooper an “a**hole.”
Unnecessary? Probably. But whether you agree with the Times’ decision or not, it’s revealing to get an accidental glimpse of the genuine, and human, frustration and struggle behind it. That’s the sort of thing a feud, however fleeting, can bring out.
The present O’Reilly feud appears to be anything but fleeting. And while it’s clearly produced its share of brutal name-calling, it’s still a work in progress. And who knows where O’Reilly’s “threat” against that Times reporter may lead?
Even if it ends in a de facto stalemate, it’s already been more action-packed than the entirety of Downton Abbey. O’Reilly, the master of modern feud culture, is giving a sort of master class of the form: Keep ratcheting things up, and eventually the feud not only obscures the original disagreement, it becomes the story.
“These guys wanna come after me?” he said in one interview about his detractors. “I’m here.” Yes, indeed. A feud-hungry public is counting on it.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss
