Each year, ratings for the Miss America Pageant get worse and worse. Last Saturday's set a new low which will stand until next year's…that is, if any network is even willing to run it next year.
There are a lot of reasons for the decline of what was once a significant event, many of them having to do with the pageant's antiquated, vapid concepts of what qualities are admirable in a woman. One I'd like to underscore is that the Miss America promoters have been beaten at their own game. Once upon a time, it was a unique way to create an artificial celebrity who could be sent out to cut ribbons at mall openings and endorse products. Today, "reality television" provides a series of extreme ways to make a nobody into a somebody, and they have to do a lot more than walk down a runway with good posture. They have to eat slugs or live in exile or dangle over sharks or marry someone on TV or, in some cases, demonstrate actual talent. Becoming Miss America looks like nothing.
I don't know anything about the company that runs the Miss America pageant but I have a hunch what's going on in their offices this week. They're having conferences and saying things like, "We have to find a way to make the pageant relevant." They're looking at tapes of Fear Factor and Joe Millionaire and wondering if there's anything they can adapt from those shows without puncturing the merchandising veneer of their manufactured celebrity. There probably isn't but before the Miss America pageant becomes too unimportant to even be televised on a network, I'll bet they institute some real stupid changes to the format. Furthermore, I'll bet they don't work, either. The problem is like the old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member. If you honestly summed up the traits and skills that a woman ought to have to be worthy of the mantle of "Miss America," they would include not entering that kind of contest.