Rupert Murdoch's mirror: American Idol, part I by gimleteye

It’s time to watch Rupert Murdoch holding the mirror to America. Yes, we watch 'American Idol'.

It is folk lore how Rupert Murdoch reached out with a golden scepter and personally blessed the show his high paid, seasoned TV executives had spurned.

Father knows best. But over time, father knowing best bleeds uncomfortably beyond better judgment. It gives us a chance to analyze the splatter.

It’s good stuff, really, if you want to understand how the biggest corporate media giant views his audience. That would be, us.

The first hours in the new series hew closely to the old formula, jazzed up. Smoother, slicker.

We liked the addition of Jewel in the first two hours on the audition panel.

Even if she was uncomfortably quiet, Jewel made Paula dull. We loved it because Paula Abdul is pretty much out of her mind, and what an effort it is for her to keep it all together.

Simon is getting worn, even if his teeth this year are very, very bright. And Randy: botox, or, is his make-up artist just working overtime?

We all watch the first hours of ‘American Idol’ for the rejects. How pitiful can American teenagers possibly be, in delusions of talent and their obsession for fame? Very.

This year, we have video cut-aways from a few contestants selected to be ‘representative’ of whatever cultural mileposts Rupert wants to will into-being-famous: in other words, B roll footage of contestants at work or in their home environments.

Short segments, but revealing. Plenty of kids get fired from their jobs to try out for ‘American Idol’: we’re not sure, but we think that Rupert has to acknowledge, somehow, their loss is his gain.

There’s the make-over artist from Mall of the Americas, who desperately wants ‘a ticket to Hollywood’. There is the boy from rural Minnesota who, his father assures us, has sung from the age of three. Neither have a voice to speak of.

So it befalls the panel to let them down, and thank God it isn’t us.

This year there is slightly more empathy from the polished team that has to deliver the ‘no’ votes, but there is also a quiet acknowledgement that failing the audition doesn’t mean you fail in life. The worst rebuke is reserved for a young male “vocal coach” who sang like a can of beans: the value condemned is the teacher blind to his own ignorance, who violates the rules of order in this little world that stands for a much bigger world, that nonetheless teenagers can succeed in—if they are not too blazingly, idiotically dumb.

And there are those.

And then there are Rupert’s military “heroes”. This is a new addition to “American Idol”, in deference to the war that Rupert Murdoch helped start in Iraq.

We have to be good to these men and women who traveled to audition in Minnesota from disparate places where the armed forces follow the lead of big corporations.

They are dressed in uniform, of course, and even if they can’t sing a lick they’re going to Hollywood, too. Because they are American idols.

We confess we Tivo’d by this part. The transparency killed us.

We had watched enough of Rupert’s soldiers fighting to defend mall culture, the makeover artists, the obsessive dreams of fame: all putting consumers in their places safely in front of their TV screens and not, like tens of thousands of young people for whom auditioning must be the ‘cool thing’ to do.

Some people will do anything for attention, even start wars on false premises.

So Fox News may be hemorrhaging viewers who have woken up to their own sordid co-dependence on liars and demagogues, but we’ll all come back for ‘American Idol’.

We are in that mirror-image, too, Tivo notwithstanding. We would like to see an "American Idol" auditioning young people for ideas, not songs, that represent the spirit and potential for our future. But we suppose everyone has their own bias.

Thanks for showing what we look like, 'American Idol'. The best is yet to come, or is it?