Culture

The Guardian Just Spectacularly Trolled The Age Over Their Waleed Aly/Nazeem Hussain Mix-up

The Guardian, you glorious bastards.

by Alex McKinnon  18 December 2014

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This morning The Age screwed up pretty spectacularly by accidentally running a photo of comedian Nazeem Hussain alongside a short article about political commentator and TV host Waleed Aly, presumably because they’re saved as “browndude.jpg” and “browndude1.jpg” respectively in the Fairfax database. What makes it even weirder is that Aly is one of The Age‘s own columnists, raising the uncomfortable prospect that everyone at The Age just calls Aly “mate” because they’re not exactly sure who this dusky, softly-spoken fellow in the office is. Hussain had some fun with the mix-up on Facebook.

Post by Nazeem Hussain.

But the Guardian’s features editor Brigid Delaney dropped the sneakiest, subtlest, most wonderful burns about the entire thing in an article that went up on the Guardian’s website earlier this afternoon. The ‘Weekly Beast’ is media correspondent Amanda Meade’s wrap of the media’s highlights, low points and screw-ups of the last week, and the latest edition briefly included a wrap-up of the Aly/Hussain thing: “The Age was ridiculed on Thursday on social media after publishing a photo of the comedian Nazeem Hussain to point to a story about its own columnist Waleed Aly. There were complaints that the mix-up was a serious case of colour blindness.”

That would be all, except dotted all throughout the article were a number of photos of Aly. Here’s one as an example. Hint: check the caption.

guardian

Enus, who you may be familiar with as the co-host of SBS World News, looks like this:

Holy shit. That is sublime. That’s like deep-subterranean trolling.

It gets better. A few paragraphs on, Delaney does it again. guardian2 And again. guardian 3 And again. guardian4 This one, though. This one is just the icing on the cake. guardian5Brigid Delaney, Amanda Meade and the Guardian, if you’re reading this: We bow down. May this joke never end.

Check out the Guardian’s Weekly Beast here, read this week’s edition here, and find Brigid Delaney on Twitter here.