Hey, good lookin'

Hmm. I wonder how we're supposed to be thinking about the central figure in this centerpiece. Maybe the online hed holds a clue!

Let's go a little farther into the mainbar:

What about the sidebar?

I'm not sure this is sinking in -- could you provide a physical description or something?

Maybe a reefer to tomorrow's story would help:

We've been over this before, but it's always worth remembering. Journalism doesn't do "objectivity" by grinding the lenses more finely, coding the data more thoroughly, devising ever-more-devious statistical tests or any of the other devil-trickery of positivism. We do objectivity by figuring out what "everybody thinks" and calibrating events -- man bites dog -- to that standard.

One of my favorite anecdotes in Gaye Tuchman's landmark "Objectivity as strategic ritual" is about the editor who complained that an obit wasn't objective because it described the subject as a "master musician." On finding out that "several paragraphs into the story, one learns the deceased had played with John Philip Sousa," he changed his mind. Sousa doesn't float everyone's boat, any more than everyone who hears "Take an umbrella to the soccer game tomorrow, moms and dads" on the Friday night news has kids or ferries them to soccer, but once enough people seem to be nodding along, the rest of us kind of fade into the background noise. It's Sousa, for heaven's sake.

One problem -- OK, one problem aside from the flexible definitions of "handsome" and the strange belief that Roman Catholics and football players are less susceptible to crime than we earthlings are -- is that when we mark off "everybody" by what we find surprising, we say more about ourselves than about our subjects. Knowing that somebody doesn't look like "your ordinary violent criminal" tells me that either (a) you don't keep up with violent crime very much or (b) this is your way of saying "white." I'm not assigning that motive to the writers here, but it is worth pointing out that the impression doesn't have to be given in the first place.