Debunked! by Richard Roeper

Author:Richard Roeper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2008-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

14

BEWARE OF FALSE IDOL VOTES

The votes were rigged last week. . . . They don’t want the Final Five to be all-female. Haley is almost as popular as Sanjaya, and is the only cute rural white girl-next-door type with nice legs. Haley and Sanjaya bring in the viewers.

—American Idol fan “Ed,” positing his conspiracy theories in a comments section on the Reality TV Web site in 2007

He was just 17 and he looked even younger. Russian women have fuller mustaches.

His hair was unlike anything we’d ever seen.

He made the girls cry, and the ladies swoon.

He had a name you couldn’t forget.

And when he sang—

Well, when he sang, hell had a name.

Dogs whimpered in put-me-out-of-my-misery agony, window-panes shattered, and music lovers the world over winced as if they had just bitten their own tongues while eating a bad potato chip.

They called him Sanjaya, and for a glorious multiweek stretch in spring 2007, he threatened to bring down the juggernaut known as American Idol. For if the talent-free Sanjaya could win the big prize, what was the point of watching this show?

It was one thing for the magnificently talented Jennifer Hudson to get booted from the show a bit prematurely, or for the barely adequate Nikki McKibbin to survive longer than the gifted Tamyra Gray—but if a tone-deaf national joke with less vocal ability than the winner of the Tuesday Night Karaoke Contest & Chicken Buffet at your local neighborhood tavern was crowned the next big thing in pop music, American Idol would lose even the pretense of credibility.

Yet week after week, Sanjaya survived.

Was it shock jock Howard Stern, urging his army of listeners to vote for Sanjaya with all their technical might? Was it the subversive “Vote for the Worst” Web site, which encouraged fans to screw with the process by casting votes for the least talented finalist?

Or was it something darker? Could it be the American Idol producers wanted Sanjaya around and were jimmying the result, as the aforementioned “Ed” asserted on the Reality TV Web site?

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