I don't hear anyone complaining

Viewers who watched CNN’s earthquake coverage this last week were bound to be struck by correspondents who looked a lot less like the usual disheveled examples of those in the profession than like bendable action figures.

You could call it the Anderson Cooper effect. Mr. Cooper has rarely missed an opportunity to showcase his buff physique (as anyone would know if he or she remembers his stripping to a bathing suit to quiz Michael Phelps). But Mr. Cooper isn’t the only CNN correspondent with a self-conscious taste for form-fitting charcoal T-shirts, accessorized with a tiny microphone clipped at the neck.

Looking somewhat sheepish about it, a newly sleek Dr. Sanjay Gupta moved through Port-au-Prince wearing a snug gray T-shirt, his hair styled in the obligatory CNN crop. His colleague Jason Carroll, reporting on Wednesday’s aftershock and looking like a guy who had done 20 quick pushups before going on air, wore a T-shirt so snugly revealing it called into question whether a disaster zone is the place to flaunt one’s gym physique. A spokeswoman for CNN declined to comment, but in journalism, as in most things, old standards of decorum are clearly on the wane.

“We know the rules of what journalists look like have changed a lot,” Ms. Steele said. They have shifted from the military style favored by, say, John Hersey, who was pictured on a United States postage stamp in a combat helmet and uniform. “That’s simply a part of where society in general is going,” she added, referring to the shift away from formality and the hierarchies suggested by wise old owls like Walter Cronkite, with their sandy mustaches, their elbow patches and pipes, toward sexy entertainment news and correspondents with “that international superstar journalist look.”

NY Times