`Sideline reporters' show their many sides.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

MIAMI _ Jill Arrington is paid because she looks good in front of one camera but criticized because she looks good in front of another?

If this makes sense to you, then so does using the phrases ``serious journalist'' and ``sideline reporter'' in the same sentence, unless that sentence is, ``I thought of becoming a serious journalist but that gave me a headache, so I decided to become a sideline reporter instead.''

Because Arrington showed her bare legs, naked belly button and uncovered cleavage in a silly magazine, some are making it sound as if she set female journalists back to the Jurassic Period, where, incidentally, Pat Summerall and John Madden started. Please. One woman's decision impacting all the women in an entire profession? There's a word for this sort of thinking _ ancient. That explains why Cote has taken a break from harvesting his ear hair and counting his liver spots to express his dusty thoughts on this subject.

Do people take Serena Williams less seriously as a tennis player because Anna Kournikova poses for magazines wearing little more than teeth whitener?

It takes a shallow mind to think that the next time Lesley Visser appears on TV, viewers will say, ``You know, I can't quite believe this news I'm hearing on Curtis Martin's turf toe because Jill Arrington flashed her tummy in that magazine.''

Let's be honest here. Arrington's magazine display is about as hardcore as hash browns. It would have fallen completely below the radar if we weren't still a society of snickering and snorting junior-high boys every time someone exposes a body ...