This year marks the 4th year for Mnet 20's Choice, an awards show that determines its winners by votes and polls decided by those in the 20's. As the Korean version of America's Teen Choice Awards, an awards show determined by the teens, Mnet 20's Choice is characterized by the unique fact that all of the awards can be determined by the fan efforts of each artist.

However, the opinions of the fans have been completely ignored this year moreso than any other year. Instead, Mnet took absolute control of the winners and failed to give trophies to those that truly won it. With Mnet's recent alliance with JYP Entertainment, most of the winners of the awards were also a part of the JYPE division.

In all honesty, there isn't a lot of people that rely on Mnet to present a fair awards show. Regardless, Mnet has been embroiled in a fairness controversy with each awards show for bulking up the trophies towards YG or JYPE, thus earning the nickname 'Family Awards.'

Each year, the problems are repeated and so we've listed a few of the problems in this year's Mnet 20's Choice.

It is no exaggeration to call this year's 20's Choice an awards ceremony for attendance. It wasn't a ceremony that awarded the stars with the best performance all year long in pop culture but rather a ceremony that awarded those that attended, turning it into a 'festival of their own.'

The only groups that weren't able to receive an award out of the 20 teams present were 'Nine Muses,' 'Secret,' and 'miss A.' All of the other singers were given at least one trophy each. Upon closer inspection, if you look at 2AM, 2PM, 4Minute, Beast, 8eight, and Baek Jiyoung, all recipients of awards, one can find an obvious similarity.

JYP Entertainment and their line companies, Cube Entertainment and Big Hit Entertainment, known for their consistent and close friendship with Mnet, dominated all of the awards.

A music associate that attended the awards ceremony stated, "Looking at the awards results, any one can tell that Mnet and JYPE have a close relationship. The fact that the two are in an alliance as partners is already a well known piece of information."

On the contrary, companies with an uncomfortable relationship with Mnet did not have their singers attend the ceremony. SNSD and Super Junior were missing due to a boycott declared by SME against Mnet for controversies surrounding their music distribution.

With trophies being hoarded to one side, a suspicion against fairness has also been revived. 20's Choice has always been awards show with the nominees decided by fans in their 20's. Mnet stated, "This awards ceremony decided winners with 50% internet votes and 50% offline research."

Nominees, polls, and votes were on support portal site Daum. However, out of the 20 teams that won, only 10 revealed the internet poll results. What is even more disturbing is that stars that won polls by an outstanding amount didn't even receive a trophy.

Jaebum won the support of 54.2% of the votes on the 'Daum Search Hot Star Award' poll but the awards trophy went to 2nd place 2PM with only 32.4% of the votes. For the female singers category, the award wasn't given to BEG GaIn, who won 1st place, but given to T-ara, who won 4th pace. For the male artist category, the award was given to Lee Jungjae, who's name couldn't even be found in the actual ranking.

These are poll results that can be found by any one with a simple search but Mnet presented their awards without any sort of explanation. 20's Choice basically dug their own grave with another fairness controversy by going against the popularity polls.

Regarding the controversy, Mnet clarified, "The internet polls are just a guide line. Winning the poll does not guarantee an award and just because they're not on the nominees list doesn't mean they can't win an award. Stars that distinguished themselves in pop culture were given the awards."

Regardless, unlike the formula promised (50% internet votes 50% offline research), Mnet used judging criteria that was off balance from the original equation. An Mnet associate stated, "In this year's show, a lot of the offline research votes were held just as important as the internet votes. We knew that fanclub members would be influencing the online polls so we held our own offline survey with 500 people in their 20's. We put a lot of weight on this survey."

Basically what the associate stated is that although they revealed a 50:50 judging criteria in the beginning, they did not follow through with it at all. Winners were chosen by a 500 person offline survey as opposed to the tens of thousands that participated in the internet polls.

Still, such an explanation cannot be believed because they did not even reveal the nominees and the voting results for the offline survey anyway.

CREDITS :
SPORTS SEOUL (SOURCE);
hazyfiasco@2ONEDAY.COM (TRANS)