this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
11 points (86.7% liked)
Eurovision Song Contest
343 readers
1 users here now
A place for all fans of the Eurovision Song Contest :D
Rules:
- No discrimination. This explicitely includes racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism. Don't be a jerk.
- Please be nice, friendly and welcoming. Criticism and discussions and okay, but don't hate on people for their opinions.
- Relevance to the Eurovision Song Contest. This space is made for the ESC, so all posts should be at least somewhat related to it.
Rules may be added or changed if necessary.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Eurovision is dead to me until they remove the expert panels. The drip was cha cha cha last year. It's rigged!
I agree the expert panels are shit, and I’m soured from this year’s, too. It seemed like they weighed it heavily towards Sweden so they’d get to host 2024 because it’s ABBA’s 50th anniversary. More and more acts have been pop ballads with hardly any stage show lately as well. I’ll watch next year, but if it doesn’t improve, I’ll be off, too.
I'm not sure how much you know about Eurovision, but each country's jury is appointed by the participating national broadcaster, not the organisers. And we've seen before that if the points announced during the show are different from what a country's jury voted, the national broadcaster loudly complains about it (see the 2022 jury drama). This means that if there was some conspiracy to give Sweden points, the broadcasters and their jury would have to be in on it too, including those of Finland, Moldova, Israel, etc (which all gave 12p to Sweden) – certainly not countries that have any interest in Sweden winning. I can't imagine the EBU pulling this off and compromising their own integrity just for a nice anniversary.
I think the actual reason for the disparity between the jury vote and the televote is more nuanced than that. The makeup of the juries could play a role here: it's only five people per country, and it's largely radio hosts, TV personalities, and songwriters, who have already established themselves in the industry. So it's not a conspiracy, just bias. Another factor is that the juries only give points to the countries they ranked at the very top; the 11th best song gets the same number of points as the 26th ranked song: zero. By design, this will mean one country or a few countries will get a big jury lead, then some countries get in the 100s of points, and most get less than 60 points. And the same with the televote. This year this was quite obvious, but it's not the first time. In 2017, Salvador Sobral got even more jury points than Loreen got this year, but because he was also the televote favourite, no one said his victory was undeserved.
I remember watching a YouTube video that analysed the juries from this year's Eurovision and they noticed that pop music represented a good chunk of the juries, which would explain why Loreen was a big hit with them. The video's here if you're curious (a long watch tho)