When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, the Miss America Pageant was a broadcasting national unifying event — earning whopping ratings, even though viewers had to endure host Bert Parks warbling “There She Is Miss America” (when I lived in India in the mid 70s I would play a tape of that to get back at the teenage son of a family with whom I lived and he’d beg me to stop. Parks also sang other songs and sometimes seemed on the same level as William Shatner as a singer). But it was an event that cut across age, sex, party and ideological lines.
Then it fell out of favor, as the premise of a beauty pageant fell out of favor amid a debate over what is a woman and how to you judge her true worth.
So the ratings fell…along with a generational interest pageants in general. It lost its longtime big network time slot and was started showing up on cable.
But now Miss America pageant is taking a step that could prove to be the final nail its coffin — a move that could well attract some viewers but will turn off a lot of others because one of the judges professionally demonizes a segment of America. It’s new judge? Rush Limbaugh (who I’m sure really needs the money).
Limbaugh will be part of a seven judge panel and the pageants chief honcho is ecstatic:
President and CEO Art McMaster said the Miss America Organization is thrilled to have Limbaugh as a judge.
Could it boost its ratings? Perhaps. Limbaugh does have a huge radio audience and the rating-challenged pageant is probably hoping this will give the event a big boost.
But in the long run, the song the event may need is: “There She Goes The Miss American Pageant.”
On the other hand, perhaps this means it’ll get a long-term option to be picked up as an annual event on Fox News, hosted by Sean Hannity, who might be able to sing There She Is (no liberal women need apply).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.