Miss America Analysis

Cue the Walking Meat Parade

Get out your makeup and tease your hair! Use your hairspray to make that suit stick and put on that fancy ball gown! Now that it is time for Miss America here come the many points of view on beauty pageants. There are some news sources who like to show more bias than others. The author of the New York Times article remained less bias on the Miss America topic than the interviewer in the CNN article.

The CNN article used was between two interviewers, Margot Magowan and Tucker Carlson, and a past Miss America pageant participant, Erika Schwarz Wright. In the interview, Margot Magowan seemed very aggressive in her questioning when she referred to the women in Miss America as “have to be paraded around in meat-market fashion” and even asks Erika Schwarz Wright, “Does anybody turn on Miss America for the pianists?” Erika strongly rebuts Margot by arguing, “You’re wrong” and “You’ve not been there”. Margot states she felt it was unfortunate that the only way Erika got that scholarship money was by fitting “certain measurements” after Erika told the interviewers how Miss America allowed her to not have any student loans after law

school. That statement made Erika become defensive and distant for the rest of the interview causing it to lack depth. Extreme amounts of bias has been shown throughout the article thus not allowing many facts to come to light and only allowing us to see the opinions of two very different people.

The second article was written by Blain Roberts in the New York Times opinion pages and it definitely showed more of two different sides.

Protesters of the pageant complain that the winners are “unintelligent, inarticulate, and apolitical”. The author defends the women in the Miss America pageant by saying most of the girls that win come from Ivy League schools and have high-level college degrees. Despite defending these women, the author still critiques Miss America because of the way it exploits women. She wrote the swimsuit competition is labeled the “lifestyle and fitness” category and that their “rhetoric rings hollow”. The label tries to calm the angry feminists but falls short. The author tries to show both sides of the argument while still sharing her opinion on the

topic.

After reading both of these articles, I assessed my own opinion on the topic of the Miss America pageant. I see both pros and cons with this topic and I chose to remain neutral. The pros are that the winners win good money to fund their schooling to continue their education and build self-esteem through interview training, physical training, and constantly having to perform in from of an audience. The cons are that the women are too sexualized in the pageant by having to parade around in their bathing suits and the talents performed by the women do not portray acts to deserve a scholarship for school.

Beauty pageants, especially Miss America, are a way for girls to fulfill their dreams of dressing up and winning money while doing it. While it might seem that there would not be many problems, many people including news sources have many strong opinions in the way pageants are being conducted. The New York Times article happened to show less bias material on Miss America than the CNN article. As an individual, I remain neutral on the topic but I have seen many people who think Miss America is nothing but a walking meat parade.