Beware when Fox News wishes you well

'Mild, medium or spicy'
The wishing well opened at Fox in the late 1990s. Look further back in the archives and you'll find examples of where the network wished someone well and actually appeared to mean it.

Whatever name is attached to it, a wish-well is generally a team effort by Fox's PR staff, Lewis said. Fox News chief Roger Ailes even contributed the memorable "his mind" line to the Turner kiss-off.

Each line is a counter-punch, Lewis noted. Fox doesn't "go nuclear" unless provoked. And he doesn't want the lines to lose impact by overdoing it.

"Not every attack on us deserves a response," he said. "It could be no response. That's a strategy. It could be mild, medium or spicy, depending on what our needs are."

Olbermann doesn't find the whole thing particularly amusing. He may be the most frequent target, and he enshrined Briganti in his "worst person in the world" feature for the latest attack.

"I've heard it all before and each time she's said it the ratings go up 25 percent in the ensuing year, so I'm encouraging her to say it as much as possible," Olbermann said. "They're just without humor and without understanding of the impact of their words. It's like O'Reilly. Every time he opens his mouth, I get more viewers."

He believes more people are laughing at Fox than with them.

"If they're going to come out and say these things, I'd much prefer the old muskrat line, whatever they said about Paula, then these attempts to sugarcoat these things," he said.

It was a raccoon, actually.

The reference is to one of Ailes' most famous quotes after Paula Zahn left Fox for CNN. He dismissed Zahn's ratings increases while at Fox as a reflection of the network's overall growth by saying, "I could have put a dead raccoon on the air this year and got a better rating than last year."

"We know (Olbermann) has thin skin," Lewis said. "Why else would he make a PR person one of the worst people in the world? Come on, we get that. What he's trying to do to O'Reilly, we're doing to him. It's obviously getting to him."

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