(FORTUNE Magazine) – After giving up on handsome Dan Rather because CBS News is ''such a sucker for squishy-soft liberal formulations'' and furthermore is ''dumb'' (see our October 27 groan for some examples), the next question was which network a fellow could turn to if wishing to hold down the squish. With many a misgiving, we finally opted for handsome Tom Brokaw of NBC News, and that is how we learned about the nation's latest social problem. The problem is homelessness among people who work and have families. But first, Tom's face. Our Brokaw file indicates that the man is extremely sensitive to charges that he is anything less than a complete journalist on the Richard Harding Davis model. What especially drives him up the wall is the common perception that pretty facery might play a role in anchorperson , selection. ''I didn't get into journalism to put on makeup and read out loud,'' he once proclaimed in an NBC ad. ''I'm not looking to be the Farrah Fawcett of TV News,'' he told the New York Times. Anyway, Tom doesn't think he is all that handsome. In a memorable interview in Interview magazine, he explained gravely: ''You take all my separate features and they don't hang together well.'' Impervious to suggestions that his nose was in the wrong place or something, members of our household gave Brokaw consistently top ratings for comeliness and stirred uneasily only when he gave signs of interpreting social phenomena -- ''the new homeless in America,'' for example. Stated premise: We now have a permanent class of people who have jobs and belong to perfectly normal families but are somehow unable to find rentable homes. The eight-minute segment was endlessly baffling. Why were that nice lady and her husband -- stated to have earned over $20,000 last year -- living in a dreadful one-room welfare hotel in New York with four kids? Were we really supposed to believe they couldn't do better than that on the $500 a month she was shown offering landlords? (Left unclear was whether she had ever tried apartment hunting without an NBC cameraman hovering over her.) Were we also supposed to sit there without muttering while Tom cloudily reasoned that the root causes of family homelessness are (a) greedy landlords converting cheap housing into expensive condos and (b) cutbacks in inferentially efficacious federal housing subsidies? Do only ugly people know that rent control is what mainly limits Gotham's housing supply? Coming all too soon: a report on handsome Peter Jennings of ABC News.