If you're watching the 5 o'clock news, and there's a 50ish year old female newscaster who's wearing a sleeveless top while she delivers information about a house that just exploded in the next city, are you concentrating on the story, or will you be so distracted by her naked arms, that everything blends together and you totally miss the part about who escaped alive?

According to the Huffington Post, there's a "powerful woman in the news business" who has a serious issue with how other female newscasters dress. So serious is her issue, that she had to make a blanket statement.

"I can't help but think the sleeveless craze has gone too far...It seems like they're dashing to a cocktail party or a sports bar. Women
have worked so hard to have a seat at the table of broadcast
journalism. Let's not regress to Mad Men status."

While it's hard to care who the mystery newscaster with the chip on her shoulder is, she does bring up two points that have long plagued powerful women in the media: just how the heck are the young and good-looking ones, and the not-getting-any-younger ones, supposed to dress?

When you're doing something like broadcasting the news, are you, as a woman, supposed to wear something visually appealing (i.e a slightly low cut top or an arm-baring shirt), or should you wear something neutral that blends into the background and doesn't really call to attention the fact that you're of the fairer sex? And going further, if you're an older woman, should you even consider these styles? Would wearing a "cocktail dress" like get-up just make you look desperate?

These days, with the 24-hour news race getting dangerously close to scripted drama, it's harder than ever to decide if the news is truly about the facts, or basically just another form of entertainment. If it's about entertainment, then perhaps Fox News is truly leading the way in putting many of their anchors in short skirts. But if the news really is supposed to educate us and give us straightforward facts, classy and chaste would probably be our best bet. Female anchors shouldn't have to apologize for being female, but they shouldn't be broadcasting (for lack of a better word) their attributes either.

But then, of course, you get into the tricky waters of "classy". One person's idea of too much skin is another person's "Sunday Best," and things gets ever trickier when one anchor is, say, "endowed" much more heavily than another. Should a girl with big breasts be denied a job as a newscaster because she'll be too distracting? That's just not fair.

Entertainment, beauty, class, and the truth can all be subjective - so what's a female news anchor to do?