Americal Idol & X-Factor: sob story required.

Some people have hard lives. Some people have really hard lives. Some people's lives just plain suck.

Do these people deserve some help and a second chance at life? Of course they do. Should we exploit these people's tragic lives in order to do this? The answer seems to be yes.

When I was looking for a photo for this article I typed "sob stories" into the Google Image Search. A photo of a pretty American Idol contestant popped up, accompanied by this article. Some one had noticed that America Idol golden ticket winners were all suddenly recovering drug addicts with special needs children.

Grab your tissues, this is going to be a long ride.

The X-Factor is an English show similar to the Idol series. The difference is that anyone fourteen years and older can audition and groups can audition as well. When they do the first few episodes where they scour the UK looking for the newest, freshest, most marketable pop sensation, they have to go through the bad auditions first.

While the singers who scream, screech, and assault your ears with awful, awful sounds during auditions probably had a measure of delusion before they went on the show, one has to keep in mind that these singers go through several rounds of auditions before they are presented to the judges. Emma, a contestant in series four (watch the video below), went through four rounds of auditions before she got to see Simon, Louis, Sharon and Dannii.

This was no accident. She was being exploited. Why? Because she made great TV. She was physically unattractive by societal standards, she was wearing a frumpy home-made dress and when was rejected she left the audition room and started crying. Her obese family members stormed into the room to give Simon a piece of their minds. Oh the drama! Oh the tragedy! Oh how the tubby girl was getting what she deserved! Right?

Emma's audition video.

But while girls such as Emma are being exploited even the contestants who do well are exploited also. In the new series an audition episode featured a woman named Rachel Hylton. It featured a lot of Rachel Hylton. Nearly seven minutes of Rachel Hylton.

Hylton was a full-time mum who had a hard life. A really hard life. A really, incredible hard life. She stated that she made bad choices and got involved with drugs, prison, and other various illegal activities. At the age of 26 she had 5 children. The oldest of which was 13. You do the math.

But she's bubbly, she's cute and she can sing! She gets four yeses from the judges and she's on to boot camp. Meanwhile, Simon Cowell is really interested in "Giving her a second chance." As if he has the power to undo years of bad decisions, abuse, convictions and unwanted pregnancies all through a TV talent show.

Last year there was another young woman with a similar, but not as severe story. Natasha Benjamin was in an abusive relationship for years. She admitted that a weapon was finally used and she could have died. Finally, she managed to tear herself away and start a new life for her and her daughter, Jazmine.

Her daughter, a cute little girl with barrettes in her hair, was also at the auditions. She got to stand behind the judges table with Simon Cowell fawning over her. The mum sang a beautiful rendition of "Un-break my Heart." She got four yeses from the judges and when Simon asked the little girl if mummy sang well, the woman got a fifth yes. She was through to boot camp!

She never appeared on the show again.

There have been millions of other sob stories on X-Factor. One woman had been scared to go outside because she had been close to a car bomb explosion, one woman found the X-Factor audition application while she was cleaning out her dad's apartment after he died, one young man had to come to the auditions all by himself because his family refused to support him in his quest to become a singer, another woman had recently fallen down the stairs and was almost paralyzed, a solider who's been to Iraq twice and witnessed two of his friends dying... you get the picture.

Suddenly you need to have a difficult life just to get some screen time. You want to have a sob story, you have to play up anything that you can so you can get a pity vote that can propel you into the hearts of your fellow countrypeople. And everyone is willing to soak it up.

It's not as if people haven't caught on to this formula. This concept was satirized in the eight episode of The Boondocks, The Real. Riley, while attempting to pimp his grandfather's ride claims that Granddad is blind in an effort to give his Pimp My Ride video an edge.

Since his dastardly plan works he decides to call up Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and get them to add an addition to their house. Riley tells them that not only is Granddad blind, but he also runs a homeless shelter out of the house. The eight-year-old then finds Jazmine, a girl who lives nearby, puts her in some shabby clothes and has her tell the camera crew that her crack-addicted mother left her in a dumpster.

In the end, Riley's brilliant plan doesn't work and the Freeman's are left with a home that's half-destroyed and Xhibit presents them with a bill for over $30,000 for pimping the car. But this just goes to show how far pity can get you. The Freemans were supposed to be benefiting from it because of all the free stuff they would have gotten and the TV shows were benefiting as well because of the viewer sitting at home thinking what a nice show this is because they're helping out blind men that are working hard to do the best that they can for society.

Kant's theory of the categorical imperative basically states that why you do something is more important than what you do. This means that you can do the right thing for the wrong reasons and the wrong thing for the right seasons. Wanting to help someone is the right thing to do. Using them to help boost ratings on a TV show is the wrong reason to do it.

In the end, if you need something to get done, then it has to be done, no matter what the motivation is. I can't recommend a solution to this issue. But until someone finally comes up with one, the idea of exploiting very real suffering in order to boost ratings leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.