RTE & the Boycott

From David Quinn's column in the Irish Independent:

If a single solitary person was to call on people to boycott RTE on a given day of the week in protest against, say, its perceived bias, how do you imagine RTE would react? I'd imagine they'd ignore the call completely and among themselves dismiss the person as a crank.
But when a single solitary person has the Catholic Church in his or her sights, it's a different matter entirely. Then the person gets all the publicity they can handle. This is exactly what happened to Jennifer Sleeman when she called on Catholics to boycott Masses last Sunday in protest against the male-only priesthood.
In the event, the call for the boycott was a total damp squib. There was no measurable effect on Mass attendance and some priests said that, if anything, attendance was up. Nonetheless, RTE covered the event as though it wasn't a total failure.
(snip)
We might ask how would RTE react if on 'Boycott RTE Day', there was no discernible drop in its viewership figures, but nevertheless TV3 went out of its way to give the impression that something of note had really taken place? Without doubt, RTE would see it is a piece of anti-RTE campaigning by TV3.