American Idol is being manipulated by Howard Stern

The King of all Media is at it again and he is proving he still has the juice!

He may not have the large audience he used to but he is pulling a stunt right now to prove he is still "The King of All Media"...including manipulating the votes on the Fox Network Show "American Idol". I love Fox, it could just be the name but that network is where I saw my first Alien Autopsy and when I first realized that we probably didn't go to the moon (search this site for related stories/clips regarding the latter). I've been watching American Idol for years and this year has been driving me (and many others) crazy when the votes come in...Grrr

At first I figured Sanjaya Malakar was part cat and nine lives (I figure he has used about four of them already). Some blogs have theorized that maybe Indian Call Centers were somehow getting behind their guy. Heck, even the judges appeared to be flabbergasted when they would hear the results and even Sanjaya himself professing he is not the greatest singer in the competition and on one results show, he looked more surprised than anyone when it was announced he was SAFE.

Finally...after tuning in to the Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite Radio, I realized what was going on. Caller after caller to the show would let Howard know that they took his queue to vote for the bushy-haired karaoke singer and they were pleased to see the "Stern Effect" take shape. Some callers even boasted making more than 300 calls/votes to keep Sanjaya in the game!!

Now that XM and Sirius have merged, they have about 7 million subscribers from what I can gather and most of those subscribers are with XM. Sirius has hundreds of channel choices so people subscribe for many different reasons. I assume most people that subscribe do in fact tune in to the Howard Stern Show but I can't see his audience being much more than a million listeners at this time (a far cry from WABC in New York which has about 20-30 million people tuning in at any given hour I understand).

So how can a small group of about a million people rock the vote so much?? Easy, the American Idol voting system has a flaw where people can vote more than once. I'm sure your average person only votes once or twice but Howard's loyal minions (kinda sounds like lemmings) are voting hundreds of times.

If this crazy experiment in manipulation is successful and they make Sanjaya the next American Idol, I think Simon Cowell is going to have a permanent scowl.