John Oliver weighed in on the Miss America Pageant, which took place last week. Apparently, the pageant claims to provide $45 million per year in scholarships for women. Oliver dug up the tax forms, and it’s more like $482,000 per year.
He’s got some great clips. They actually asked the women last week to solve the ISIS problem. Another was asked about the Gitmo hostage exchange.
Also, Oliver really zings the pageant badly by going and checking out their tax records. While Miss America claims to give $45 million in scholarships a year, he found out that it’s more like $482,000. About $44.5 million short.
Oliver then went and attempted to get the tax filings of every Miss America pageant in every single state. The numbers didn’t add up.
It turns out that they tally the scholarships that individual pageant contestants have been offered by schools around the country. For example, Miss Pennsylvania is offered a choice of four scholarships, but Miss America tallied all four together, even though the winner will really only take one.
Another “scholarship,” $2.5m to a school in Alabama, is really only a $54,000 scholarship that Miss America then multiplied by the number of pageant contestants, 48, since they could all theoretically attend the university if they all wanted to. In fact, no one accepted a scholarship from that school that year.
I’m really blown away that Oliver did this. Wow.
My Uncle Hayden got an almost new cream Mercedes M-Class Diesel by parttime working online at home. see here now genuinemoney.com
One of my all time favorite moments. Thanks for sharing again. Merka – we’re number one.
Oh noes! Miss America has lied to us! Is nothing sacred?
And, bahahahaha!
http://jezebel.com/miss-america-was-kicked-out-of-her-sorority-for-abusive-1636095561
Why does this not surprise me?
John Oliver’s delivery could use a bit of mellowing (he has an annoying habit of simply repeating himself in a more emphatic tone, as if that makes a punchline funnier, when really it doesn’t).
Aside from that, I’ve really enjoyed and look forward to his weekly in-depth segments. Whether it’s the mendacious, misogynistic farce that is the Miss America pageant, or the militarization of the police, or incarceration in the U.S., or his now classic “let’s make the debate on climate change mathematically fair and balanced” bit, the fact he can go on longer and without commercial interruption means there’s less simplification than in, say, The Daily Show or Colbert Report segments. Also, as Oliver has commented, the show really is trying to report on important matters in ‘old news’ (i.e., the eponymous Last Week Tonight), but unlike TDS/CR, he’s not trying to be a parody news show.
But these ‘beauty pageants’… gawd. That we still have them in 2014, rewarding women primarily on the basis of their looks and bodies (the rest is just proverbial window-dressing), is an appalling statement on the status of gender equality and sexual objectification.
Then again, we also have these proudly woman-hating creeps:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/09/who-are-these-creeps.html
Creative accounting can generate the most impressive results, even when the substance of reality lags far behind. It’s interesting to learn how very creative the off-stage accountants are with the Miss America pageant’s claims.
So Miss America has never really been about scholarships after all. Is anyone really surprised?
One would hope that some mainstream media investigative journalist would hop on this!
Sometimes I really crack myself up. “Mainstream media investigative journalist.” I should write comedy.
I thought that the feller contestant would have been in speedos and butt glue… Sadly, no…!
Crickets, baby, crickets!
It’d go something like this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
I’m dying to hear the Miss America Pageant organization response to this.