EDITORIAL - Contest within a contest

The fiasco brought on by the Texters Choice Award in the recent Miss Cebu Pageant, in which one candidate who allegedly had the most number of texted-in votes was not declared the winner of that award, should not spell the end of the pageant.

True, the resignation of that candidate from her place in the top five, and the reason for such resignation, which seems to be valid and justified under the circumstances, may have placed the Miss Cebu Pageant in a very bad light.

But all is not lost. The pageant can still be saved. And there is compelling reason to save it, considering that it has become an integral part of the Sinulog festivities. Not even attempting to save it would be tantamount to letting the entire Cebuano community down.

But saving the pageant would require a serious rethinking of the way it is being undertaken. For example, the putting up of another award other than the main award, which is the Miss Cebu title, is in fact a fiasco waiting to happen.

Putting up another award opens up the entire pageant to the risk of conflict. What if one award does not jibe with the main award, as what precisely happened in this year's edition?

Even if the process of arriving at results is above board, it is still open to speculation.

And speculation is precisely what activities such as beauty pageants should avoid like the plague. If we are to understand it in context, a texters award is just like another beauty award, the only difference being that it is the public who makes its choices, not the judges.

When a candidate chosen by the public is different from who the judges pick, there is bound to be, at the very least, ugly speculations. And when speculations ruin reputations, the demise of public interest soon follows. Without public interest, pageants are dead.

So, for their own sake, as well as for the sake of the Cebuanos, who deserve to have a fiesta free of controversy, organizers of the pageant should do well to avoid awards that pose the slightest risk of producing results that may contradict the main result.

There are so many other ways of sparking public interest in a pageant. All the organizers need to do is to put their heads together. But one thing they must not do again is to have another contest within a contest.