"The biggest reason this is in the news," CBSSports.com's Gregg Doyel said on CNN yesterday, apropos the Steve Phillips saga, "is because she's not real good looking." She isn't? I hadn't heard. People are usually so delicate about such things.

I mean, other than the New York Post's dubbing Brooke Hundley "the shlubby seductress," "the tubby temptress" and "the portly production assistant," of whom the press got its first glimpse when she "waddled" out of her apartment; and other than the Post's general habit of calling her "shlubby" and "portly" to draw a contrast with the "handsome Phillips" and the "handsome married baseball analyst Phillips," whose wife is the "beautiful, blond, green-eyed" Marni, a "stunning, green-eyed blonde"; and other than Doyel's going on Howard Kurtz's useless Reliable Sources and calling Hundley "not very pretty," "not very photogenic," "not real good looking" and adding that all the people Googling like mad for her image have come away "not impressed"; and other than that one guy on Joy Behar's CNN show who compared Hundley to Jack Black and Danny Devito and declared that Marni Phillips had every reason to be nervous about a "woman with an 18-inch neck"; and other than Joy Behar's mistakenly referring to her as "this guy Hundley" and then correcting herself by saying to her panelist, "You got me so crazy that she's so not attractive, I think she's a man" — other than that, I'd say that, yeah, the media have been pretty mature about the irrelevant matter of her looks.

Send an email to Tommy Craggs, the author of this post, at .