The Idol Guy

“Shocker.” “Surprise.” “Upset.” These are all words that we’ve all seen used to describe David Cook’s win this year. They’re also signs that whoever wrote them is a complete ignoramus about Idol.

Anyone who’s watched the show and followed along with the Idol punditocracy knows that even Archuleta “winning” Tuesday night was no guarantee of him walking away with the title. Idol voters are not as dumb as some writers think; they’re quite capable of looking at the whole season up to date and considering how well both Davids did up to that point. By that standard, it was a very close match - as we said so before the finale!

Of course, most of the news outlets repeating the “shock” nonsense are the same ones that printed, as if it was hard fact, that Archuleta had “knocked out” Cook in the finale. We all know how well that worked, didn’t it? The pattern we see is the same: lazy reporting. Both the “knockout” and “shock” lines were the easy and comfortable ways to report the story. Unfortunately, both had the rather big problem of being wrong.

Here’s our tiny little suggestion to these media outlets. Instead of just blindly reporting what comes over the wire, how about having someone who is actually watches Idol - and already writes about it - write something for you? There’s a big, big Idolsphere - the What Not to Sing project is living proof of that. There are plenty of good writers, bloggers, forum posters, etcetera, who would absolutely jump at the chance to write about something they love for a major media outfit. And anything they write would be infinitely better than the PR-written trash that calls itself Idol news in most newspapers.