Make Sanjaya Malakar win so Simon quits ! Sanjaya Malakar, whose cringe-inducing vocals on "American Idol" have launched a thousand jokes on late-night TV and millions of fiery postings on Web sites, made it through another week Wednesday. After more than 30 million votes were cast following Tuesday's performance show, fellow "Idol" performer Gina Glocksen was sent home Wednesday, reducing the field to eight. For the fourth straight week, Malakar didn't even finish in the contest's bottom three despite a performance in which he strangled and left for dead all the high notes in Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek." This week's vote guarantees the lush-haired Sanjaya - his last name has largely been lost along the way - another seven days of shelf life as a pop culture phenomenon. The buzz around "American Idol" contestant Sanjaya Malakar doesn't mean he'll win the Hollywood competition, the show's executive producer says. Ken Warwick said hype on the Internet and the radio won't affect "the vast numbers of votes we get," which aren't revealed, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday. Shock jock Howard Stern and the Web site votefortheworst.com have pushed "to get a bad contestant as far as possible," the votefortheworst Web site said. But Warwick said the "anti" vote wouldn't make up the difference between Malakar and the people ahead of or behind him in the weekly call rankings. "Say what you want about Sanjaya, he hasn't a bad voice," Warwick said. "Personally, I don't expect him to be there in the end. But it's not up to me, it's up to the public." Labels: AMERICAN IDOL, HOWARD STERN, JAMES EDSTROM, SANJAYA MALAKAR, WINNER
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