Is The Daily Telegraph Trolling Us With This Weird Piece About Waleed Aly?
Is it an excellent troll if you have to explain that it's an excellent troll?
This morning you may have seen a lot of talk about a bizarre listicle on The Daily Telegraph entitled “Six reasons why Waleed Aly should not win Gold” which is basically a nonsensical follow-up to yesterday’s ridiculous Daily Tele ‘insider’ piece: “DIVERSITY AND THE INTERNET ARE RUINING THE LOGIES!”
Written by a journalist called Victoria Hannaford, the piece is an illogical mash of points that argue that Waleed should not win because, among other things, Leigh Sales should have been nominated, his role on The Project is unclear, maybe he’s only nominated because of diversity and also, he’s not on Twitter. Oh, okay.
Unsurprisingly, this piece has been called out as an extension of The Daily Telegraph’s anonymous source’s selective shading of the only two non-white Gold Logie nominees Waleed Aly and Lee Lin Chin, and as clickbait.
Is this a parody? At least half the reasons are actually good reasons why he should win eg: "We need more diversity on TV"
— Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) April 5, 2016
Lmao like Waleed Aly is the best thing about the Project how is his nomination at all controversial (besides obvious racist reasons)
— maddy (@maddydell) April 6, 2016
Name 1 person who's had a bigger impact on Australian tv in the last 12 months than Waleed Aly? #logies #gold #theprojecttv
— lehmo (@lehmo23) April 6, 2016
Reasons Waleed Aly Should Not Win Gold Logie:
1) It would be very embarro for him.
2) He isn't Kerri-Anne.— Peter Taggart (@petertaggart) April 5, 2016
6 reasons why writing about why Waleed Aly shouldn't win a Gold Logie is bad
1. Nope
2. Reasons are garbage
3. No
4. Nope
5. No
6. Log off— Eliza Berlage (@verbaliza) April 6, 2016
But then after a couple of hours of everyone criticising The Daily Telegraph and making fun of Hannaford’s own lack of Twitter followers, Hannaford started reweeting her critics. Some people even congratulated her for the excellent “troll”.
Excellent troll from @vhannaford here. Unfortunately people will take it at face value because they want to… https://t.co/8fiK5BOjwb
— Eliza Goetze (@elizagoetze) April 6, 2016
So, one of two things has happened here. One is that Hannaford, being personally offended by The Daily Telegraph‘s coverage of diversity and the Logies, decided to satirise the reactionary Australian TV industry and mainstream news coverage by thinking up some illogical defenses to systemic racism. The slightly-more likely scenario, is that she was told to capitalise on yesterday’s outrage clicks, wrote a dumb and offensive article really quickly, and is now trying to save face like: “Haha, tricked you all, isn’t the Australian media’s racism funny, haha!” It seems an odd thing to ‘troll’ people about it, but who knows?
@macleanbrendan @vhannaford oh. I guess I didn't want to believe someone would write something that nonsensical.
— Eliza Goetze (@elizagoetze) April 6, 2016
And now, whatever the truth is, we are all talking about The Daily Telegraph so we are all ultimately failures.
We deserve it.
—