SINDOs story mentions boards.ie

I don't think your man wrote it with a slant, to be honest. He left it open to interpretation and simply left it up to the reader to decide. Putting in a lot of the negative comments about celebrities balances it considerably (e.g. Amanda Brunker...he didn't defend her and made her look a right tit by posting about how she said she'd get her husband to bash 'haters').

Of course nobody expects celebrities to be unanimously liked. The nature of celebrity is that they are simply figureheads to slot in the jigsaw of the public narrative. If we want to demonise drug abuse, the media follows someone off on a bender. If we want to 'get' footballers for living such lavish lifestyles, the media digs up dirt on them playing away from home. The public narrative is, a lot of the time, miles away from the truth though (because the public don't care about what a celebrity is really like, just what it means to them...i.e. a guy slagging off Tubs can score points with his friends for being funny, even if it is an unfair criticism) and perception can change at the drop of a hat.

Where it becomes bullying and crosses the line, in my opinion, is when they take their vitriolic hate directly to the source. If you were to see even the most disliked of celebrities, take Ryan Tubridy for example, and watch them walking down Grafton Street having every aspect of their life destroyed by each angry, passing person...would you not feel that something was wrong there? He's just a guy doing a job, taking a position that any of us would take if offered, he hasn't committed a crime or done anything wrong. But do the same behind a computer screen...and all of a sudden he's expected to take it because he gets paid a high salary.

The phenomenon of people staying in to watch TV shows they clearly hate and criticise it online is also one worth covering by the media. I'm not even giving a personal opinion on it here, I'll watch shows I know I'm going to slag off myself...it's just an interesting, emerging part of Irish culture that should be picked up by the media and examined.

c0rk3r wrote: »

This is sad but true. I never understood why people just, you know, don't watch the late late instead of watching it then moaning. Waste of time and energy

So just be quiet about anything in this life you are unhappy about? To be fair people are mostly on the thread to make general jokes about the guest or music act and others to enjoy them. But Tubridy is awful.

It's win-win for the Sindo when they run stories like this. They guarantee that it gets picked up by the people it's aimed against and in return it causes people to continue in the vein described in the article.. self perpetuating stupidity.

Nodin wrote: »

I've never understood the ability to sit through that.

I'd watch a "worst of" show though.

The majority of it is terrible, but sometimes you get a guest, usually foreign who doesn't know him, who clearly can't stand him and doesn't get his attitude at all.

Juliette Binoche was a good example, and I'll never forget the absolutely bizarre moment when Tubs refused to let Samuel L. Jackson open an envelope with a competition-winner's name in it, and insisted that Sam hand it to him!

I usually never watch it live though, instead checking out clips I've heard about online, or I'll occasionally switch over if I notice something posted on the thread in the TV forum that looks like it could be good.

A particular corner of online Ireland seems to have it in for Ryan Tubridy. Boards.ie, a site that hosts a variety of special-interest forums, is buzzing with Friday-night haters who reckon the best way to end the week is watching The Late Late Show with a bottle of wine and the laptop next to them on the couch.

If their negative comments on the site are anything to go by, they sound like they are sitting there in leather bondage gear, with a pool ball tied into their mouth, the remote control just out of reach, being whipped by a dominatrix in a Ryan Tubridy mask. They take incredibly perverse pleasure from watching Tubridy every Friday. The worst thing you could do to them is cancel the Late Late. Except, of course, they're masochists, so they'd probably enjoy the pain.

I found that funny. The rest of it? Meh.