The Internet Is for Scorn

Meet the Web's 10 most hated people

The Internet may provide endless hours of productivity-killing diversion and free-ish pornography, but that's not all it offers. The Web also gives us a cloak of anonymity, allowing every man, woman, and child to expel anonymous bile on strangers—be they the real-life TV celebrities we can't stand, or infamous figures brought to the nation's attention via YouTube. Below, Radar's list of the 10 people the Web really, really loves to hate.


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(Photo: Getty Images)
10. RACHAEL RAY
The queen of quick cuisine—"Snapper in a snap," anyone?—has more than her fair share of real-life haters, but it's on the Internet where Ray inspires the most intense vitriol: A Google query for "Rachael Ray + hate" returns more than 600,000 results, most of which express just how much the poster would like to smack Ray upside the head with a rolling pin when she's trilling for Dunkin' Donuts or liberally applying EVOO to "You Won't Be Single for Long Vodka Cream Pasta" on 30 Minute Meals. The leading voice in the field is the eponymous "Rachael Ray Sucks," a LiveJournal community that has been trafficking in anti-Ray sentiment since 2003. The website's founder, Azraelle, has her own reasons for hatin' on Ray: "The thing that angers me the most is the fact that she uses onions in her 'dog-friendly' recipes. Onions are toxic to dogs, and it infuriates me that she is encouraging people to potentially harm their beloved pets," she says. "As far as her annoying quirks go, I hate how cumin is never just cumin; it is always smoky cumin. God, that rides a nerve."

Funny thing is, we actually hear that Ray, who can often be spotted chain-smoking and swearing loudly outside her studio in Chelsea Market, is surprisingly cool in real life. Proving, once and for all, that Internet popularity and quality as a real-life human being rarely go hand in hand.



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9. TONY KORNHEISER
In his capacity as Monday Night Football host, ESPN talking head, out-of-touch radio personality, and Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser has made a name for himself with his brand of funny-ish, if not totally revelatory, commentary. Not so funny, however, were comments he made earlier this year about the growing preponderance of sports bloggers. (Well, some people probably found him funny, but bloggers certainly didn't.) On his daily radio show, Kornheiser had this to say about sportswriters with a modem but no credentials from a legitimate media outlet:

"...They think they know what they're talking about, and they think they have sources. They have no sources. They make stuff up. They're toads. They're little toads. Actually, they're pimples on the behind of the greater body politic in this country and in this city. And because, because they have access to airwaves and three or four people read them, they think, 'Oh, I'm very important.' In fact, in fact, if a huge dumpster landed on their mother's house, and got all the way into the basement and crushed them, nobody would care. Nobody would miss them. They provide nothing good, no service that's any good at all. They, they are, they are, they are sucking mole rats, and that's the nicest I can be to them."

Given that ESPN personalities have made a habit of stealing material from such "sucking mole rats" and passing it off as their own, Kornheiser's rant didn't exactly go over so well on the Web. (That fact that his ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption, is essentially 30 minutes of inane blog-style banter doesn't help his case.) So he did what any reasonable person would do: He turned to the well-respected D.C. Sports Bog, name-checked a few sites he actually thought were okay, and then closed with the following, uh, apology: "So, to make a very, very long story short and wrap it up, I was not attacking all the blogs—although God knows I could if I wanted to—and they could attack me."

We'll give you one guess how that went over.

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