Ginger Zee ‘Dancing With The Stars’ Controversy: Is The Fix In For The Finals?

Ginger Zee has a solid shot at making it to the Dancing with the Stars finals, but there’s some speculation that she’ll only end up there because the judges have been unfairly scoring her all season long.

So why would Carrie Ann Inaba, Len Goodman, and Bruno Tonioli inflate Ginger Zee and Val Chmerkovskiy’s scores to ensure that they are one of the final three couples? The answer is simple: Dancing with the Stars airs on ABC, and Ginger Zee is a member of the ABC family. The 35-year-old Mirrorball Trophy hopeful is the chief meteorologist and weather anchor for ABC’s Good Morning America.

Celeb Dirty Laundry contends that the DWTS judges have lavished Ginger Zee and Val Chmerkovskiy with excessive praise and higher scores than they deserve since the very first episode of Season 22 of Dancing with the Stars. Ginger tied with Nyle DiMarco and Wanya Morris for top spot on the leaderboard during Week 1, and the fix really seemed to be in when judge Carrie Ann Inaba tried to paint Ginger as the next Bindi Irwin, Season 21’s beloved Mirrorball Trophy winner.

“Are you familiar with a woman named Bindi Iriwn?” Carrie Anne Inaba asked Ginger Zee, according to the International Business Times.

“Watching you dance brought me right back to Bindi Irwin’s Week 1. You have something phenomenal — you are infectious. You lit up the joint. There’s something about your attack and commitment to every move that’s just pure joy.”

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Celeb Dirty Laundry points out that the push to get Ginger to the finals intensified during Week 4’s Disney Night. She and Val danced a foxtrot to “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast, but Ginger didn’t have to do as much dancing as some of the other competitors — during the first 35-40 seconds of the routine, Ginger and Val did more acting than dancing. However, the judges didn’t complain about a lack of content. As Entertainment Weekly reports, judge Len Goodman did complain when Nyle DiMarco and Peta Murgatroyd spent 3-4 seconds pretending to play barrels like bongo drums during their Tarzan routine.

The “lift police” also didn’t issue any citations for the two lifts near the end of Ginger and Val’s Beauty and the Beast routine, and the couple ended the night tied for first place with Paige VanZant and Mark Ballas.

Ginger Zee was awarded with the first perfect score of the season during Week 7, an honor Paige VanZant would have had if the dances had been in a different order. PureDWTS argues that Ginger’s dance didn’t seem as deserving of a perfect score after Paige performed.

“When comparing it to Nyle, Wanya and Paige’s dances earlier in the season, it wasn’t even close to a 30. When stacked up side by side with Paige’s dance on the same night – not even close. Paige’s dance was jam packed with content, was extremely fast, harder, and better performed,” PureDWTS writes. “I find it a disservice to both women to give those dances the same perfect score when Paige is dancing at a much higher level.”

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Ginger and Val are the only couple that can boast having two perfect scores, and they’re one of the few couples that hasn’t had to overcome a video package that paints them in a negative light. As reported by Bustle, Wanya Morris was shown getting frustrated with his manager during a phone all about scheduling conflicts, and Nyle DiMarco took a lot of heat for jokingly saying that he sees Val Chmerkovskiy as his main competition. As Us Weekly reports, Nyle even got scolded by Len Goodman after the judge saw this video package during Week 6.

It’s not really fair to claim that Ginger Zee has made it as far as she has on Dancing with the Stars just because she’s an ABC employee — it’s clear that she can dance. As the Inquisitr previously reported, Ginger even made the Valparaiso University dance team in college.

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However, Ginger Zee has claimed that she had no dance experience before Dancing with the Stars.

“I was nervous coming out here as this new mom with no dance experience, but it means so much that the joy I felt getting on that stage shined through and was felt by the judges and the audience,” Ginger told People after the performance that earned her the Bindi Irwin comparison.

Do you think the Dancing with the Stars judges have been influenced by Ginger Zee’s connection to ABC?

[Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Women’s Health]