We nearly choked on our cocktail olive while reading the profile of Sunrise host Samantha Armytage in News Corp's glossy Sunday tabloid insert (yep, they really do still print those) stellar last weekend.
The piece, by Jordan Baker, portrays Armytage's June 2013 installation as David Koch's sidekick as coinciding with "the arrival of new players into the country's online gossip market, which changed the character of local celebrity news and created a booming market for paparazzi shots of well-known Aussies going about their daily lives." Er, what has Sydney's Daily Telegraph – particularly its mindless Confidential pages – been populated with these last few years? Syndicated essays from the London Review of Books?!
Baker's copy oozed superiority at The Daily Mail's "notorious" story on Armytage's "granny panties showing a visible line" in December, "causing such a furore the editors were forced to apologise."
Easily the greatest atrocity here is that demand even exists for stories related to anybody's visible panty line. But lest we forget it was the Daily Tele, in September 2014, that published an excruciatingly nasty and gratuitous piece (our favourite kind) by shelved scribe Annette Sharp about Armytage's appearance. For it, the newspaper's photo desk specifically requested unflattering pictures of the breakfast anchor.
For selective memory and delusion by omission, nobody beats News Corp. Its least respectable journalists turn their noses up at The Mail Online despite having only ever produced material that belongs in it. Every single one of the Murdochs' Australian tabloids is now loss-making, a couple of them frighteningly so. Bogans want crap content but even they're not stupid enough to pay for it anymore – the stupidity here is still trying to charge for it.
