Buzz Bissinger is the author of the Texas high-school football book Friday Night Lights and Prayer for the City, which is about Philadelphia under former Mayor Ed Rendell. Mr. Bissinger also wrote the Vanity Fair article on which the movie Shattered Glass was based. He is 53 years old, with a wide, almost froglike face and glasses, and on the night of Tuesday, April 29, he participated in a panel discussion on HBO’s Costas Now, hosted by NBC sportscaster Bob Costas, on the subject of sports and the Internet. The other panelists were Will Leitch, editor of the sports blog Deadspin.com, and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards.

Here are some of the things Mr. Bissinger said—or yelled, rather, and with what appeared to be more than a bit of spittle—to Mr. Leitch:

“I really think you’re full of shit.”

“I think that blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed.”

“I think the quality of writing on blogs is generally despicable. And yes, I say this as a writer who spent 40 years of his life trying to perfect the craft.”

“I think you are perpetuating the future, and I think the future in the hands of guys like you is going to dumb us down in a way we can’t recover from.”

Even Mr. Costas, who has taken his share of lumps on Deadspin and is generally regarded as upholding the mantle of the traditional sports journalist (in the panel discussion he also seemed confused as to the difference between a blog post and blog comments), appeared taken aback at Mr. Bissinger’s outbursts. In both style and substance, Mr. Bissinger seemed like a relic.

The next day, the blogs exploded. Mr. Bissinger was called an idiot, and worse. And then he did something one sees more and more of these days: In several interviews, on radio and online, he apologized. It was like the air went out of the balloon—pfft …

What happened to the days when an enemy was an enemy, till death do they part? When was the last time anyone said anything coming close to the eruption of Norman Mailer at the 1986 World PEN Congress, when in response to a letter signed by several prominent writers protesting his inviting Secretary of State George Schultz to deliver opening remarks, he snarled, “I didn’t bring the secretary of state here to be pussy-whipped by you.” Or the time when William F. Buckley said to Gore Vidal on national television, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” True, writer Jonathan Franzen did recently call New York Times’ lead book critic, Michiko Kakatuni, “the stupidest person in New York,” but somehow it didn’t have the same pizzaz.

Of course it’s not just in the realm of literature and sports that people have long known that cultivating enemies is a way, albeit a risky one, of making one’s name and becoming known—the idea being that any association, even negative, with someone more powerful and famous is ultimately beneficial. And there is that old saw, no publicity is bad publicity. But now more people seem to be thinking, “Wait—there is such a thing as bad publicity.” For example, it’s hard to see which of the antoganists benefited from recent high profile feuds between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric.

In an interview, Mr. Leitch seemed sanguine about being, however briefly, Mr. Bissinger’s enemy. (Mr. Leitch has also incurred the wrath of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban over an interview Mr. Leitch did with him in GQ and then discussed on Deadspin—another example, in Mr. Leitch’s and many others’ eyes, of the cluelessness of the stubbornly non-wired generation.) “I’m perfectly happy to be the smiling happy enemy for people who don’t quite get it yet,” Mr. Leitch said. “I don’t think any of these people hate me or dislike me because I’m doing mean things to them. So in a way that helps me, because I know I’m not doing anything wrong. I suppose if I were a real combative personality I would only hurt myself in the situation.” Mr. Leitch said that Mr. Bissinger had sent him an e-mail last week, the details of which he asked Mr. Leitch to keep private. But all signs point to its being a reconciliatory note.

Can a shared skim (hold the foam) latte be far behind?

Wasn’t the Internet supposed to be the place where enemies were cultivated, where trash talk could be taken to a new high (or low)? What’s with all this making nice?

“I have no issues with Buzz Bissinger,” said Mr. Leitch, who is 32. “He did a sports radio tour. He apologized for his behavior. He stood by his initial points but he realizes he went off the handle.

“I do feel so bad for him,” Mr. Leitch continued. “I saw a site that had nothing to do with sports or journalism, and it posted a video of his appearance with the headline: ‘Crazy Old Man Goes Crazy.’”

Surely, though, there must be enemies in the sports world, The Observer wondered; what of the classic rivalries of bygone days, not just between teams but between players? Mr. Leitch sighed. “So many people have so much to lose in the world of sports,” he said. “Athletes have too much to lose, sponsor-wise.”

“Making enemies, or at least attacking people, used to be an effective method of getting places in this town,” said the former gossip writer Jared Paul Stern. “Look at Graydon Carter, who made a career of ridiculing Si Newhouse at Spy, only to end up as his highest-paid pet. Things still operate on that principle to some extent. Sometimes you have to poke people in the eye to get their attention, let them know they can’t afford to ignore you.”

That being said, Mr. Stern has a rather jaded view of enemies these days, ever since billionaire Ron Burkle accused him of attempting to extort $220,000 in return for favorable coverage in The New York Post’s Page Six, where Mr. Stern was a regular freelancer. “It’s a bitch having a billionaire for an enemy if you don’t happen to be one yourself,” he said. “For one thing, they fight dirty. … But the downside to putting a gossip columnist out of work is that they then have nothing better to do than make sure everyone knows what an evil, degenerate bastard you are. In general you don’t want to piss off gossip columnists. They’re well schooled in retaliation.”

Of course, Mr. Stern learned at the feet of a master, Page Six honcho Richard Johnson, who has made a career out of cultivating a head-spinning network of enemies, frenemies and rivals. When New York magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote that Mr. Johnson’s Page Six had become “emasculated” in the wake of media gossip blogs like Gawker (where I used to work), Page Six wrote an item in which they asserted that Ms. Grigoriadis was too ugly to be raped. Cross Page Six, and you’ve got an enemy for life.

But more and more, such vinegar-laced vigor has become the exception. Resources in media have never been scarcer; jobs are virtually impossible to come by, and the risk of pissing off the wrong person is simply too great. Having, and keeping, an enemy requires a delicate pas de deux; to remain enemies, each party must continually raise the stakes in response to anything their enemy does, and have the resources and/or the platform to do so. There’s no fun in having an enemy who can’t fight back. Mr. Stern and Mr. Burkle only became enemies when Mr. Stern returned fire. Until then, he was just someone Mr. Burkle had attempted to quash.

Cathy Horyn, the fashion critic at The New York Times, famously gave bad reviews to collections by Carolina Herrera and, most recently, Giorgio Armani, reviews which resulted in the designers banning her from their shows. But Ms. Horyn made public their feud by responding in The Times in March, pointing out that “what being banned tells me is that fashion has entered a borderland between the old and the new. Practiced mainly by older designers, whose careers took flight in the 1980s, banning seems a reflexive action against a perceived threat to their power.” It’s a theme echoed by Mr. Leitch; both seem to regard the cultivation of enemies by the respective aging dinosaurs of their fields with bemusement. Ms. Horyn and Mr. Leitch, then, have situated themselves squarely outside what they implicitly argue is an antiquated way of doing business.

Likewise, the feud between New Republic literary editor Leonard Wieseltier and Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan (Mr. Wieseltier accused Mr. Sullivan of “Jew-baiting” for criticizing William Kristol’s comments about what Barack Obama had said about people “clinging to religion”) seemed, instead of exciting and urgent, simply sad, another effort by an aging editor clinging to power to remain, in some way, relevant.

Indeed, writers are a notoriously jealous lot, but these days few will go to the lengths of actually getting enemies (at least, not publicly). “This woman decided she was my enemy because of something someone else had written online,” said one New York writer in her early 30s. “If she knew I was going to be at a party, she wouldn’t go. Finally she reached out to me to reconcile because she had a book coming out and she didn’t want me to say anything bad about her.”

Even one of the most famous literary feuds of our time has just recently been resolved; Dale Peck and Rick Moody have called a truce after years of mutual hatred, just before both were slated to appear at the same charity event. It started when Mr. Peck called Mr. Moody “the worst writer of his generation” in The New Republic, and escalated from there. For years Mr. Peck was perhaps better known for his deft cultivation of enemies as he was for any books he wrote; it was part of his persona. Today, though, Mr. Peck has less of a need to cultivate Mr. Moody’s enmity—he recently got a $3 million, three-book deal with Heroes creator Tim Kring.

Perhaps because it still operates on a somewhat anachronistic system, book publishing is an industry that is notorious for its enemies. Just this week, the news that Random House’s chairman, Peter Olson, was, essentially, getting eased out undoubtedly inspired more than a little schadenfreude in his predecessor (and assumed enemy), Ann Godoff, who had been unceremoniously dumped from her post in 2003 after failing to meet financial targets, which is what Mr. Olson is himself reportedly on the ropes for. Or take the continued enmity between Nan Talese, Riverhead editor Sean McDonald and their fallen angel James Frey. In a new Vanity Fair profile, Mr. Frey repeats his assertion that his disproven memoir A Million Little Pieces had been submitted to his editors as a novel, not a memoir. In this newspaper, Ms. Talese responded incredulously, saying, “He said this again? I can’t believe he said that! You’d better check that because it’s simply not true.”

Indeed, it’s unusual for a publishing feud to become public, which is undoubtedly in part why Judith Regan’s lawsuit against her ex-employers, filed last November, was so shocking. In it, she laid bare her enemies at HarperCollins, who included publisher Jane Friedman and executive editor David Hirshey, as well as those at News Corp., such as Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. The lawsuit sent the publishing world into a tizzy, and reinforced Ms. Regan’s reputation as an unpredictable, dangerous woman.

Indeed, for the most part, the emotions that fuel feuds are still boiling away under the surface. Enemies have gone underground. Which is frankly a much scarier state of affairs. One of the features of classic enemies was that, out of a sense of a kind of mutual fairness, they always had the good manners to broadcast the feud, so that witnesses—colleagues, peers, friends—were always the final arbiters. Publicly known enemies battled with the assurance that the blood was always, ultimately, fake.

On the MTV “reality” show The Hills, Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag have created careers out of hating each other, aided and abetted by Ms. Montag’s boyfriend, a deliberately slimy dentist’s son. But it’s hard to believe that the women would be perpetuating their feud if it wasn’t for the cameras that follow them around all day, or the Us Weekly covers that their fight has led to. In “real” life, the socialite Olivia Palermo found out very quickly that trying to make enemies of more powerful women in her circle, like Tinsley Mortimer and Fabiola Beracasa, might get her a few Page Six mentions, but was ultimately an unfruitful way of rising through the social ranks. Ms. Palermo overreached, and got swatted down, and in the process she learned a very important lesson: Choose your friends well, but your enemies better.