It seems everyone's out to get Nine, especially the public

The great Australian past-time known as "Eddie bashing" - a mildly popular Australian game, where media commentators, snooty-nosed journalists, and tv critics who have a penchant for quality television put the boot into poor old Eddie McGuire and his subordinates over at Channel Nine - has grown so popular in recent weeks that it's no longer exclusive to those inside the television or media industries. For years now bloggers, myself included, have been more than happy to throw sharp, often downright nasty blog posts about McGuire and Nine onto the information superhighway for everyone to read, but until now the sport of "Eddie Bashing", for which you can substitute "Nine Bashing" if you wish, hasn't managed to permeate into mainstream Australian culture. Presumably there were still some people unaware of how frustrating Eddie's Broadmeadows schoolboy charm really can be. Well, not any more.

The News.com.au readers have voted with their mice and rushed to a story posted earlier in the week (the story originally came from The Daily Telegraph's Sydney Confidential gossip column) about how Nine's exclusive Kylie interview, which Nine aired on monday night, had failed to make it into the top 10 rating shows for the night. A huge slap in the face for poor Eddie, who put down $300,000 for the exclusive rights to air the interview. News.com.au don't tell you how many hits its most-popular story gets each week, but you can safely assume that the wave of popular opinion has turned against poor Eddie, and that the viewers have turned away from Nine. It's been three weeks since the media caught a whiff of the rotting culture inside the upper echelons of Nine's senior management from Mark Llewellyn's leaked, and rather damning affidavit. And now the public has managed to get a hold of the scent, they're looking for some more juicy, bloody gossip. In an odd way Channel Nine has inverted the formula for attracting an audience: where ratings and commercial success normally drives a show's or even a whole station's popularity, Nine's dismal ratings are actually turning more and more people away from the station, with the audience hoping that if they don't watch they'll get more of a chance to read another bitchy rant about how poor old Eddie is cowering under the immense pressue of running the good ship Nine.

Of course News.com.au's figures could be an aberration, or even incorrect, and I'm not discounting either of those possibilities. There's even the chance that, in the true kick-em-when-they're-down spirit of commercial television, Kerry Stokes may have even put a message out to all of his cronies (he does have a lot of friends, you know) asking them to click through to the Daily Tele piece in the hope that it would generate some more bad publicity for poor old Eddie. If so, it's worked a treat. After all this time, Stokesy may have finally earned the title of the number one Kerry in the Australian television game.