Word: idol
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...education. Simon Cowell, the elder of the group and the only one who has turned 50, is perhaps the most famous name in the business, with a television and music operation that generates significant profits for rival Sony Music. Simon Fuller, the youngest, is the impresario who devised American Idol and managed the Spice Girls...
...other vital economic sectors.) But the goal is 100,000 workers - a number that will require more than the $25.5 million the UNDP has so far garnered in donations and pledges for the project, which is why the agency has been bringing celebrities like Angelina Jolie and recent American Idol winners to Haiti to promote it. Participants, who have to be at least 18 years old, work six-hour shifts each day for two weeks; only one worker per family is allowed and that family has to have been affected in some way (a death, a destroyed house...
...York Times estimated that at any given time, there are 1,000 people on air as reality TV stars. (That may not seem like a huge number, but compared with, let's say, full-time TV critics, it's quite a healthy field.) For a few talented individuals - say, Idol's Kelly Clarkson or the cooks of Top Chef - this has made possible actual real-life opportunity. Jennifer Hudson lost on Idol but won an Oscar as an actress. Elisabeth Hasselbeck went from eating bugs on Survivor to chewing out Joy Behar on The View...
...what message is it all sending? The viralization of people like American Idol's General Larry (Pants on the Ground) Platt and William Hung before him has led to the charge that reality TV invites us to laugh at little people for sport. The fame of Jersey Shore's tanning-bed casualties and others brings the critique that reality TV celebrates violence, sluttiness (male and female) and other bad behavior...
Maybe the best example yet of the reality-fiction alliance is Fox's high school choir spoof Glee, which, in essence, is American Idol in teen-dramedy form. It is a literal re-creation of the pop appeal of Idol (just like Idol's, Glee's songs fly to the top of iTunes on a weekly basis). And it's also a critique of the American Idol culture that made it possible. In the words of Rachel (Lea Michele), "Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor...