Raf welcomes back our awards for racist and bigoted journalism, use #TheTrashies to nominate before 29th October 2018

The Trashies are back to counter the boiled chicken takes, in newsrooms so white and male they should come with a health warning for minorities and women.  If you’re tired of cloistered journalists and columnists writing that same stale “legitimate grievances of the working class” opinion piece to justify some good old-fashioned bigotry then we have the chance for you to respond!

For those who don’t know, The Trashies are awards for bad journalism. Particularly work that’s prejudiced at best and straight up hate speech at its worst. There’s a note of humour to it because its run by those of us who often bear the brunt of some of this bile (you have to laugh), but The Trashies also serve as a buffer against the gaslighting of minorities by groups of journalists that refuse to take their concerns seriously as in the case of transgender activists.

The Trashies is also about highlighting systems and structures in mainstream publications that perpetuate a spectrum of negative tropes towards groups that are underrepresented in our newsrooms, from antipathy to outright hostility.

As an example of structural inequality and lack of accountability we can take Andrew Norfolk’s Muslim foster story for The Times in 2017. This erroneous piece of ‘investigative journalism’ used the most base of Muslim stereotypes, and was quickly carried by the likes of The Daily Mail and The Sun in a collective groupthink by a press that has set British Muslims as the enemy. The Times’ ‘report’ has now been completely discredited. Too late.

There is no crisis of free speech as the media class constantly tell us, there is a challenging of writers on issues such as misogynoir, anti-blackness or simply talking about or over minorities. The Trashies hope to facilitate discussions on how minorities are portrayed in the press, and how newspapers from Left to Right can do better.

We are in a world where there is a direct route from Guido Fawkes to writing in a supposedly left-wing liberal establishment, but the commentariat are left clutching their collective pearls when the wrong type of black woman is invited to do a talk for Black History Month.

For 2018 we’ll be coinciding our winner’s announcement with the Comment Awards, which this year saw fit to nominate Melanie ‘Londinstan’ Phillips for an award in the diversity category – in fact the Comment Awards are stuffed to the gills with past nominees of The Trashies.

“I was made a judge at the 2016 Comment Awards and spoke at their Comment Conference” writes Media Diversified and The Trashies founder Samantha Asumadu in a recent article. “Not that me being on the judging panel made a blind bit of difference in making the shortlist or winners more diverse.” Instead there’s just canapés and speeches on how the most elitist of professions is now assailed by minority interest groups and how Giles Coren can’t even make jokes about Chinese people that would have been branded embarrassingly racist in the 70s.

Here are the details for how you can get involved!

WHEN? Nominations open today, Monday 15th of October until noon on Monday 29th October and a winner will be announced on 16th November, coincidentally enough at the same time as the Comment Awards.

HOW DO I NOMINATE? We need you to nominate a particularly egregious article that is factually incorrect, or so dog whistling in its text that dogs within its radius howl in pain. Your submission needs to show why the article you have chosen is worthy of a Trashies award. A screenshot or link to the piece, with a short – and we mean short – explanation as to why it’s bad, will suffice.

WHAT DON’T WE WANT? We’re not interested in your personal feuds with writers, nor will we tolerate harassment of columnists or journalists on the basis that they have been nominated for The Trashies.

Also – and this can’t be emphasised enough – we will not be accepting anything from people with a gammon hue and three lions on their shirt, submitting articles where they feel the writer is reverse-racist; this is not Spiked or a Newsnight segment on a day ending with Y. Because like Yaxley Lennon being silenced by the media, and Tony Blair’s soul, reverse racism is a myth and a figment of Toby Young’s mind.

The Trashies isn’t about yet another panel discussion about diversity hosted by The Guardian on how we can at some point distant future have a journalist class more representative of the UK in 2018. We don’t even want black and brown faces running interference for an industry not fit for purpose.

Use the hashtags #TheTrashies or #TheTrashiesUK to nominate an article. We look forward to seeing you on November 16th for the fourth Trashies Awards Ceremony.

UPDATE 22/10/18 for the last week of nominations we are also opening the category for nominations of transphobic pieces in response to recent events.

After some interest from our friends in Canada we’re also offering the opportunity for Canadians to get involved with their own Trashies. More info about this will be updated here. In the meanwhile you can use #TheTrashiesCAN to nominate in Canada.