The feud between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann keeps viewers tuning in

reporting from new york

Two weeks of vitriolic exchanges between cable news hosts Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann have amped up viewership for Fox News as efforts by corporate executives to strike a detente fell apart.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who face off in the 5 p.m. PDT time slot, have been attacking each other's networks ever since news broke earlier this month that executives had sought to tamp down the personal attacks by the two men, whose sparring has long been a staple of the cable news wars.

The renewed feud appears to have benefited O'Reilly, whose show "The O'Reilly Factor" averaged nearly 3.5 million viewers between Aug. 3 and 13, the nine days following the news of the supposed truce. That's 7% higher than his average viewership so far this year and 12% more than his average this quarter, which began June 29. He also recorded more than a million viewers in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic twice last week, his largest showings among that age group this year.

"Countdown With Keith Olbermann" pulled in an average of 1.17 million viewers between Aug. 3 and 13, down 4% from his year-to-date average but up 13% for the quarter.

Their inflamed rhetoric comes at a time when cable news has been dominated by particularly strident exchanges. The televised coverage of the brawling town hall meetings over healthcare reform has helped fuel angry debates on the topic.

Even in that context, the verbal war between O'Reilly and Olbermann has been notably fierce. The MSNBC host has repeatedly attacked O'Reilly, whom he called "a racist clown," while O'Reilly has been aiming most of his ammunition at MSNBC's parent company, General Electric, which he suggested was manufacturing parts used in roadside bombs in Iraq.

That prompted a furious response from GE, which called the report "irresponsible and maliciously false."

This was not the aim when Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes and General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt held a lunch meeting at Rockefeller Plaza in April and agreed to try to cool the tone of the rhetoric. Immelt and Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of Fox News' parent company, News Corp., reaffirmed that commitment in May at a private Microsoft conference held in Redmond, Wash. Executives at both networks carried that message back to the two hosts, urging them to refrain from personal attacks on the air.