{"id":15652,"date":"2002-08-22T11:06:00","date_gmt":"2002-08-22T11:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/2002\/08\/22\/i-debated-posting-this-story-because-it-would\/"},"modified":"2002-08-22T11:06:00","modified_gmt":"2002-08-22T11:06:00","slug":"i-debated-posting-this-story-because-it-would","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/2002\/08\/22\/i-debated-posting-this-story-because-it-would\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\" alt=\"American Idol contestants\" src=\"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blogicons\/americanidol.jpg\" \/>I debated posting this story, because it would mean admitting that I&rsquo;ve been watching <i>American Idol<\/i>.  Well, I got sucked in and have been watching, although I don&rsquo;t feel half as guilty as I did when I watched <i>Bachelorettes in Alaska<\/i>.  Although I was dubious of the fact that the call-in public was responsible for choosing the winner, I figured that Fox was handling the voting process in a responsible and secure manner.  So I am pretty damn pissed off that once again &ldquo;fans&rdquo; have managed to stack the phone-in votes, this time in favor of Nikki McKibbin, one of the most tone-deaf, uncharismatic, and talentless contestants to appear on the show.  The fact that she&rsquo;s lasted this long was a pretty good indicator for me that things just weren&rsquo;t right.  Tamyra Gray, who was eliminated last night, could well have deserved to win the entire contest, although Justin and Kelly are also great performers; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2002\/SHOWBIZ\/TV\/08\/22\/ew.tv.idol\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\">this CNN article agrees with me<\/a>.  As I suspected, this USAToday story reveals how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/tech\/news\/2002-08-16-american-idol_x.htm\" target=\"_blank\">&ldquo;war dialers&rdquo; and &ldquo;phone phreaks&rdquo; with access to autodialers and computer software that can make up to 250,000 calls in two hours (!) have influenced the votes.<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/3501955-85370220?l=www.driko.org%2Findex_blogger.html\" alt=\"\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I debated posting this story, because it would mean admitting that I&rsquo;ve been watching American Idol. Well, I got sucked in and have been watching, although I don&rsquo;t feel half as guilty as I did when I watched Bachelorettes in Alaska. Although I was dubious of the fact that the call-in public was responsible for &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/2002\/08\/22\/i-debated-posting-this-story-because-it-would\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[118],"class_list":["post-15652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-imported"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.driko.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}