Posted on 05/21/2003 4:24:46 PM PDT by pbear8
Nor do you KNOW their reasons for latching onto Ruben as the star in the early days, anymore than the other folks who are speculating as to various motivations.
Finally, in case you haven't figured it out yet, what upsets people is not the prospect of Clay starving to death. It's about the people being deceived. If it's no big deal to you, wonderful. It really rankles the Fairness Meters on a lot of folks, though, including me.
MM
The entire Drudge story was petty!
It was the whining of "a top executive of a rival network" -- a network that can still smell its own burning rump roast after the monstrous Nielsen overnight numbers the AI finale posted last night.
Gee, ya think another network's president (speaking on the condition of anonymity) might want to sully the show's image?
Apparently, votes for RUBEN IN FLORIDA got through under #01.
Did anybody else besides me in America get the interim female voice that told me to stop dialing? That is very suspect if just Clay voters got that interim message. Did any Ruben voters get told to stop dialing?
What an unfortunate name for a girl.
130,000, not 1300.
Clay's CD at the top of the charts well before the finals?
Clay's CD isn't on top of the charts. It isn't even out yet. It's just on top at Amazon because of pre-release sales. (It's just a CD single, too, not a whole CD. And Ruben's is right behind Clay at #2.) And it doesn't take much to get to the top of Amazon's charts, because they just don't control a particularly meaningful percentage of the record market. If you're only selling 500 copies a day of the #1 album on Billboard's charts (the 500 number is purely hypothetical; I don't know Amazon's exact sales figures), then it only takes a few hundred rabid teenage girls - out of 40 million people who watched last night - placing orders for their new heartthrob's single to make it "number one."
No, I am not a mind reader and I don't "KNOW." But I don't understand why the more unlikely suggestions resonate so much with people when there are more simple explanations. It annoys me that when we can't "KNOW," some choose to grant the sinister equal weight with the reasonable.
Finally, in case you haven't figured it out yet, what upsets people is not the prospect of Clay starving to death. It's about the people being deceived. If it's no big deal to you, wonderful. It really rankles the Fairness Meters on a lot of folks, though, including me.
What deception? No one has yet given any reason to support the idea that there was some fixing involved in the voting besides individuals' anecdotes of not getting through, and rival network executives' self-serving insinuations.
Everyone who was paying attention knew that people could call as often as they could. Week after week, the vote was up to the viewers at home, and if the masses' opinion was so easily swayed by the judges' opinions, Joshua Gracin wouldn't have survived to the final four after the judges unanimously criticized him (Trenyce was ousted that week, and Ruben was knocked to the bottom pair). Why did Josh survive after horrendous renditions of "Bad Blood" and "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye" after which Simon sneered, "You can't win this competition. You know that, don't you?" Think maybe it was because Josh's legion of fans wanted to prove Cowell wrong?
Regarding Tuesday night's vote, IMHO, it's more likely that Ruben's fans took to heart Ryan Seacrest's exhortation that every vote counted, and Clay's fans justifiably thought that awe-inspiring final note wrapped things up for him -- as Simon suggested.
This is all very reminiscent of Pauline Kael's lament after the election of Richard Nixon: 'How could he have won? Nobody I know voted for him.'
If they did this at all, it was just an inside joke based on the fact that so many people assume he's the same guy, which he is not:
Q: Who is Randy Jackson on ''American Idol''? Is he the same Randy Jackson of The Jackson 5?Go plug "randy jackson" into Google. There's a million of them out there.
T.L.S., DallasA: ''American Idol'' judge Randy Jackson has been in the music business for 20 years, but he's not a member of the Michael Jackson family.
Jackson is a Grammy Award-winning producer and a former vice president of A&R at both Columbia and MCA Records. He has recorded, toured and performed with the Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Madonna, Elton John, Destiny's Child and other music stars.
Michael Jackson's younger brother Steven ''Randy'' Jackson joined The Jacksons in 1976, replacing brother Jermaine.
New flash for ya, Sparky. I'm very white.......and I'm not a redneck. I happen to be a college educated, white collar marketing professional in a Fortune 5 corporation. The kid Clay (who happens to be from Raleigh, where I reside) is a great kid with a fantastic voice (and as one who is a vocalist and musician of over 30 years, I know what I'm talking about) and easily has a far superior singing voice compared to Reuben (sp?). It was no contest. If I had 'voted' for Clay, would that make me a "redneck"? What an incredibly stupid thing to say.
It's not the same Randy. Randy Jackson is a highly-respected studio musician (he plays bass guitar), and briefly joined Journey just before Steve Perry left the group.
The other Randy Jackson should be so talented. In fact, the Randy from the Jacksons is probably happy to be mistaken for the AI judge rather than having to constantly answer the question, "What the heck's up with your freak brother?"
It's like Richard Hatch. Before Survivor, THE Richard Hatch was the TV actor who replaced Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco cop show. Now, THE Richard Hatch is the fat, gay, nude guy who won the first Survivor.
On election night 2000, the head of a rival campaign was calling it a modern day $64,000 question ... well, he was calling it something far, far worse, actually. We all knew instantly that said person had ZERO credibility based solely on who he was working for. The same ought to apply here. A bunch of whining by a guy with a direct pecuniary interest in seeing American Idol DESTROYED cannot be taken seriously unless he puts up some serious incriminating evidence. The "unnamed source" put up no evidence whatsoever.
All the calls went to the same computer. The only difference was the computer noted whether the call was to line one or line two. If anything went wrong with the computer or overloaded the computer, both Clay and Ruben were affected at the same time, for the same length of time. Ruben won fair and square.
Even last night, when the voting was already done, they didn't accurately present the back-home events. If so, they would've used the same camera angles of Ruben's gathering as they did of Clay's. They didn't. They pulled the same trick that many people here on FR gripe (justifiably) about when the other networks cover a NOW "rally" with tight camera shots that don't reveal that there were twenty or thirty people there, instead of hundreds or thousands. That same spirit of favoritism has been there since the beginning, and if you don't see the unfairness and deception in doing that, then you just don't. Plenty of people do, and it does not make you informed and those who disagree uninformed.
There's also a very real issue on the phone lines when a Ruben voter (his mother) was able to place 205 votes Tuesday night, while Clay voters from all over the nation report dialing for three hours and getting through one time, or a scant few times, or NO times.
Bottom line: When there's smoke, more often than not there's fire at the core. There's a lot of smoke swirling around AI right about now.
MM
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