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29/05/2019
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Updated May 29, 2019; Posted May 29, 2019
Miss America 2018, Cara Mund, crowns Miss America 2019, Nia Franklin, at Boardwalk Hall in September 2018. The Miss America pageant will not be returning to Boardwalk Hall in September.
Tim Hawk | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Miss America 2018, Cara Mund, crowns Miss America 2019, Nia Franklin, at Boardwalk Hall in September 2018. The Miss America pageant will not be returning to Boardwalk Hall in September.
By Amy Kuperinsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Following news that Miss America would be leaving its longtime home at Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall, pageant officials announced that the traditional Atlantic City event would also be parting with its broadcast home.
The 2020 Miss America pageant will leave ABC to air on NBC, the Atlantic City-based Miss America Organization announced Wednesday.
NBC will host a two-hour broadcast of the pageant, the organization said, leaving the exact location and date of the pageant unknown.
In April, the executive director of the state Casino Reinvestment Development Authority said that Miss America would not return to Boardwalk Hall, where the pageant usually returns each September.
The pageant was last broadcast on NBC in 1996.
“Miss America is thrilled to be back home at NBC with our 100th anniversary just around the corner," said Regina Hopper, the pageant CEO and president, in statement Wednesday. “NBC is the perfect partner to tell the real stories of these intelligent, talented and socially conscious young women who will be the country’s next leaders.”
In September, the pageant drew just 4.3 million viewers, a decrease of 19 percent from the 2018 pageant’s 5.4 million viewers.
It remains unclear whether the pageant will stay in Atlantic City or leave for another city.
In 2018, the CRDA gave Miss America $4.3 million. A state audit of the CRDA released in September faulted the authority for failing to monitor costs and contracts relating to Miss America and not commissioning an economic impact study before giving the pageant more money.
The Miss America Organization previously said the CRDA is committed to keeping the pageant in Atlantic City, but that organizers would be exploring options for host cities.
“The date and location of the competition will be announced soon,” pageant officials said in the NBC announcement, referring to the pageant as a “scholarship competition.”
The Miss America Organization did not respond to a message sent by NJ Advance Media after the announcement. For most of its nearly 100-year history, the pageant’s home base has been Boardwalk Hall, with the exception of several years. In 2006, Miss America left Atlantic City for Las Vegas, but returned to the boardwalk in 2013.
“The show will continue to highlight a diverse group of young students and professionals who are advancing the message of female strength, independence and empowerment through their efforts in the areas of scholarship, talent and social impact,” the announcement said, highlighting recent efforts to rebrand the anachronistic pageant as a socially conscious outlet for young women to obtain scholarship money.
Nia Franklin, the former Miss New York, was crowned Miss America 2019 at Boardwalk Hall in September. She was the first Miss America to win without having to wear a swimsuit, and the fourth Miss New York to win in five years.
Unrest at the 2019 pageant centered in part around the efforts of new pageant leaders Hopper and Gretchen Carlson, chairwoman of the Miss America board of trustees, to ditch the traditional swimsuit competition. Miss America board members claimed Carlson and Hopper, who had been installed in the wake of an email scandal that involved the former pageant CEO and leadership team, told them that the broadcast would not air unless the swimsuits were a thing of the past. But ABC did not make that stipulation.
Critics accused Carlson, Miss America 1989, of conflating the swimsuit competition with the #MeToo movement. Carlson had emerged as an early leader in the growing movement when she spoke up about sexual harassment through her case against her former Fox News boss Roger Ailes.
Former Miss Americas and state pageant directors spoke out against Carlson, Hopper and the Miss America board, calling for their resignation due to a lack of transparency in decision-making. Further compounding the conflict were claims from Miss America 2018, Cara Mund, that Carlson and pageant staff had bullied her, which Carlson denied. An investigation commissioned by the pageant claimed to have found that Mund’s claim was without merit, but Mund rejected the report’s findings, saying the inquiry was rushed and compromised.
After the 2019 pageant, a number of state pageants whose directors had signed a letter calling for the resignation of Carlson and Hopper lost their licenses, including New Jersey. Later, New Jersey and other states had their licenses restored on the condition that they would install new leadership.
Carlson and Hopper supported the pageant’s elimination of the swimsuit competition just before the 2019 pageant by saying that the move would make the pageant more inclusive, since they claimed that contestants would no longer be judged on their physical appearance.
This approach manifested in the pageant’s recent announcement in language like this:
“The Miss America Organization has ushered in a new era of progressiveness and inclusiveness, led by an all-female leadership team.”
The Miss America pageant started in 1921 and was devised by Atlantic City businessmen as a way to keep tourists on the boardwalk past Labor Day.
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