There have been some big news stories breaking in the past couple of days, but it beggars belief that Samantha Armytage's choice of underwear is among them?
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Private Sydney: man behind 'undie-gate' ...
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Private Sydney: man behind 'undie-gate' uncovered
The Sydney paparazzo who managed to get Samantha Armytage's knickers in one almighty knot is revealed.
We watched anxiously from afar as the plight of thousands of civilians in Aleppo became unimaginably worse as the bloodshed continued even after a long-awaited ceasefire.
We collectively shook our heads over President-elect Donald Trump giving it to the Chinese over his telephone call to Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen.
But it was another story that really got us clicking – Armytage's "Granny panties" scandal.
Across the online media sphere, it was the Armytage underwear story that generated the vast majority of online traffic over successive days as the furore built over the treatment of Sunrise co-host Samantha Armytage and those now infamous pictures purporting to show the outline of her "unflattering" underwear.
Even the likes of Armytage's great television rival Lisa Wilkinson from rival show Today chimed in on the matter, taking to social media to air her views on Twitter. Wilkinson, a seasoned journalist, was silent on Aleppo, Trump and Voller, but was apparently so moved by the Armytage story that she labelled it "disgusting".
The media coverage given to the Armytage story eventually resulted in the Daily Mail amending its original story and offering the television personality an apology after she conveniently let it be known her lawyers were "looking after it".
Of course the treatment of Armytage was ridiculous, but surely it was more risible than worthy of the deluge of analysis and condemnation afforded it; after all, it was the Daily Mail.
Armytage herself has openly discussed her body image issues in the media, along with other seemingly intimate personal topics, including her love life.
At any moment on any given day of the week, online media outlets are filled with photo-driven drivel dressed up as "celebrity news", from describing Kylie Minogue's "pert derriere" to Victoria's Secret models flaunting their "sizzling bikini bodies". Such patently sexist commentary is nothing new and Armytage, a fully franked celebrity, is far from immune.
Ironically the offending set of images that ignited the initial story were resold at some profit for the paparazzo who took them, 22-year-old Liam Mendes, the same photographer who was the subject of an unsuccessful AVO police had sought this year on behalf of Michelle Bridges.
The Daily Mail paid a paltry $112 a frame for the two Armytage photos it used, but the photographer has made significantly more than that following the media over-reaction, with Rupert Murdoch's troops snapping up the shots to illustrate its coverage of the scandal, only to run them even more prominently.
The original proof sheet that featured the Armytage images, which were taken in full public view on a street in Bondi, was captioned "Sam Armytage is spotted in Bondi, Sydney after numerous relationship rumours". It made no mention of her underwear, an "angle" generated by the Daily Mail.
Indeed, such a relatively inexpensive outlay for the shots has been quite profitable given the hundreds of thousands of clicks the story generated for the website.
Ironically, the outrage those shots generated only helped to fuel the story's popularity.