Web fans threaten Idol's secrecy
Who is Cardin McKinney, and why are there blogs and Web sites dedicated to her? Why are "insiders" with "reliable information" on forums predicting that she's the next American Idol winner?
(Warning: This article doesn't contain any spoilers, but it talks about spoilers. If knowing the existence of spoilers is likely to spoil things for you, then stop reading.)
The short answer is that Cardin McKinney is a 20-year-old singer from Nashville, Tenn., via Alabama. If you journey over to her MySpace page, she's got a nice husky voice and she's darned attractive. She's also apparently a contestant on this season's Idol, though neither her audition nor her audition city have made it to air yet.
Support for this contestant, who hasn't even made a blip on the radars of the 30 million fans whose viewing consists solely of watching Idol on TV, is so strong on some message boards that a Cardin backlash has already begun. An alleged contestant who hasn't appeared on national TV, hasn't had to deal with an awkwardly incompatible theme night, hasn't faced the week-to-week scrutiny of the judges is already facing fierce debate on whether she's overrated.
American Idol has become a little weird.
For several years, Fox and the show's producers have done a good job of keeping a handle on the unique tightrope that American Idol has to walk. On one hand, the show is meant to be all about live-ness. The winners are chosen by the American people voting with reliably arbitrary weirdness on a week-to-week criteria known only to them. Every week's decision offers the potential for a surprise, either in the Bottom Three or the elimination and even prognostication sites like DialIdol, sites I frequent myself, haven't taken the edge off of an occasional shocker.
That being said, as much as American Idol is about live-ness from mid-February on, Fox gets its best ratings of the season out over the increasingly prolonged audition episodes that fill six to eight weeks of chilly winter programming, episodes that were filmed months ago.
It used to be that with the usual nondisclosure agreements and general media silence, Fox could air the auditions and the Hollywood round and the results were kept under wraps.
This year, though, a poster on IdolForums.com put up a list of the Top 50 back in December, a list culled from a mixture of online sleuthing, word-of-mouth and circumstantial evidence.
As American Idol reporting goes, it's a fine piece of investigative journalism.
source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/tv/5475974.html
(Warning: This article doesn't contain any spoilers, but it talks about spoilers. If knowing the existence of spoilers is likely to spoil things for you, then stop reading.)
The short answer is that Cardin McKinney is a 20-year-old singer from Nashville, Tenn., via Alabama. If you journey over to her MySpace page, she's got a nice husky voice and she's darned attractive. She's also apparently a contestant on this season's Idol, though neither her audition nor her audition city have made it to air yet.
Support for this contestant, who hasn't even made a blip on the radars of the 30 million fans whose viewing consists solely of watching Idol on TV, is so strong on some message boards that a Cardin backlash has already begun. An alleged contestant who hasn't appeared on national TV, hasn't had to deal with an awkwardly incompatible theme night, hasn't faced the week-to-week scrutiny of the judges is already facing fierce debate on whether she's overrated.
American Idol has become a little weird.
For several years, Fox and the show's producers have done a good job of keeping a handle on the unique tightrope that American Idol has to walk. On one hand, the show is meant to be all about live-ness. The winners are chosen by the American people voting with reliably arbitrary weirdness on a week-to-week criteria known only to them. Every week's decision offers the potential for a surprise, either in the Bottom Three or the elimination and even prognostication sites like DialIdol, sites I frequent myself, haven't taken the edge off of an occasional shocker.
That being said, as much as American Idol is about live-ness from mid-February on, Fox gets its best ratings of the season out over the increasingly prolonged audition episodes that fill six to eight weeks of chilly winter programming, episodes that were filmed months ago.
It used to be that with the usual nondisclosure agreements and general media silence, Fox could air the auditions and the Hollywood round and the results were kept under wraps.
This year, though, a poster on IdolForums.com put up a list of the Top 50 back in December, a list culled from a mixture of online sleuthing, word-of-mouth and circumstantial evidence.
As American Idol reporting goes, it's a fine piece of investigative journalism.
source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/tv/5475974.html
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