I apologize to those of you who wildly support this show, but it is a complete farce. I’ll admit I enjoy watching the brutal singers at the start, but for the most part I stay away. I guess on occasion if there’s a knockout from the fairer sex I might stop and have a look – muted of course. Anyway today I’m going to let you in on how much of a sham the show truly is. Some of you may have heard about Vote For The Worst during the Sanjaya saga, and I’m sure you were pissed as hell that someone was trying to influence the results. To be honest VFTW had been influencing results well before anyone had ever heard of Sanjaya, they just hadn’t been as successful as they were during Sanjaya’s run. You might ask why in the world would I waste my time reading about this stuff? Perhaps I enjoy messing with people’s dreams and the sanctity of Idol just a little bit.

First off the thing that surprises people is that the auditions aren’t completely fair. Most people say that they knew that the audition system wasn’t perfect as it would be impossible to push a 100,000+ people through an audition process. Here’s a coles notes version of some audition myths – full article.

MYTH #1: "The auditions take place over one or two days and everyone gets to see Simon, Paula, and Randy." – contestants are at the auditions for about a week with the judges showing up for the last day or two and seeing only 100 people screened by the producers.

MYTH #2: "We see a truthful depiction of each audition." – The show does some fairly extreme editing. In fact there are several contestants on record stating that they didn’t sing the song for the judges that was shown on TV. In fact they sang it for the producers, but it was edited together to make it look the way we see it on TV.

MYTH #3: "The bad singers are not encouraged by the producers." – It makes for good TV and the producers know it. So of course they encourage them.

MYTH #4: "The good singers always make it through." – During the audition process singers are sent to a table. The judge at that table has a mandate and in some cases that mandate is to reject everyone that comes to them regardless of their talent. There are just too many people to go through and the only way to send them on their way is to let them sing and tell them they aren’t good enough - even if they actually are.

MYTH #5: "Everyone has a shot at becoming the American Idol." – Before the singers even get to Hollywood the producers know who they want to have in the finals. No matter how well certain people perform they aren’t going to make it, and vice versa. It’s a reality TV show not a singing competition.

Further to MYTH #5 the producers plant people on the show. They have been selected outside of the normal workings of the audition process, made audition for the judges to make it seem legitimate, and rubber stamped onto Hollywood and beyond. See this article, AI 8 Plants, for the plants of American Idol 8 - plants have been prevalent for several years.

Finally to further explain how Sanjaya, among others, made it as far as he did check out Dialidol.com. It’s a simple autodialer that can vote thousands of times with no effort by the user. Too bad for all you folks dialing in by hand there’s no way you’ll out vote the autodialers (you could download it yourself and vote for a deserving person I guess). Notably there are rumors that Sanjaya actually received more votes than the other contestants prior to him being voted off the night he left. This is semi-confirmed by Simon’s comments that night as he inadvertently indicated that Sanjaya was going to be going home prior to the results being released. The judges aren’t supposed to know the results until we do, hence the charge that the producers had notified the judges that they were finally going to remove the kid themselves.

Overall I don’t really care, but I thought I’d let everyone in on what a farce the show has become. Enjoy it for what it is – reality TV. Notice how, for the most part, very few of the Idols have gone on to be successful?