A couple of months after television personality Sonia Kruger’s on-air call for Muslims to be banned from entering the country, Cosmopolitan magazine has backed away from endorsing the presenter in its Woman Of The Year Awards.
Speaking to Fairfax, Cosmopolitan editor Claire Askew said Kruger, “100 per cent, does not reflect the opinions of us or our readers.” Askew also said her appearance on the TV Presenter Of The Year list – alongside Samantha Armytage, Carrie Bickmore, Erin Molan and Sylvia Jeffreys – was approved and went into publication before Kruger’s mini-Trump tirade.
via Cosmopolitan.
Despite that public disavowal, Askew has still left Kruger on the list of nominees. Sure, she claims there was a “big debate in the office” about Kruger, but Askew said “it’s up to the readers to vote and whether she should be the winner or not,” and that she “[trusts] them to choose the best woman who they think deserves the award.”
Pre-emptively claiming Kruger is straight-up unrepresentative of Cosmo’s audience while still giving punters the option to cast a vote in her favour sure is an, uh, interesting move. Regardless, you’ll have to wait until next month’s award ceremony to see how this whole thing shakes out,
If you feel so inclined, you can scope out the vote right here. Take note of the taglines provided for Kruger’s entry, too: her description as a provider of “sensible opinions” was pretty thoroughly maligned when the nominations were first announced, but it’s still right bloody there.
Baffling.
