Jury still out on Idol judges

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This article was published 02/08/2010 (5746 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The hope that Fox’s portion of the TV press tour would include a major announcement regarding who will fill the empty chairs on American Idol’s judging panel was dashed, quickly and completely, when the network’s top programming executives met with media types here in Hollywood on Monday morning.

"The only thing I can tell you with absolute certainty right now is that no one who wasn’t on the show last year has signed a deal yet, on either side of the camera, to join American Idol next year," said Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Rice. "There has been tremendous speculation … (and) much of the information that has been written has been accurate, and some of the information that has been written is wildly inaccurate.

"I’m not going to get into confirming or denying which ones they are."

And with that, pretty much any discussion or line of questioning focused on Idol’s future was shut down. Rice declined to comment of reports that Kara DioGuardi is also leaving the show — on the heels of Simon Cowell’s exit at the end of last season and Ellen DeGeneres’s announcement last week that she won’t return for a second season — and would not discuss Randy Jackson’s status or recent suggestions that producer Nigel Lythgoe might be rejoining the show.

The Internet has been abuzz with rumours and wild guesses regarding who Idol’s new judges might be — the names most often repeated have been Jennifer Lopez and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler — but for now, rumours and guesses are all that they are.

Rice did say that the network and Idol’s producers intend to have a full judging panel — whether that means three or four isn’t clear — by the time the show’s second round of auditions begin in mid-September.

Stay tuned.