Actually the photos, as must of us suspected, are a huge letdown. Mostly Miss New Jersey Amy Polumbo partying with her friends. (Watch the whole Today Show disclosure here.)

The most striking trend among the photos: Amy's fixation with her own breasts. In one photo, her boyfriend is biting her left breast. ("He's being silly and immature but he's also very intelligent," she says.) In another photo her best friend from drama club grabs her breast (same breast). In the last of the Tata Triptych, she holds two tiny pumpkins up against her breasts. This one is actually kind of arty. The colors are gorgeous and the composition is quite nice. While Amy's not exactly busting out (the point of the photo), the actual picture is. It really jumps out at you.

Reporters bristle when they're accused of being manipulated by the White House. Like many others, I think that American reporters' failure to ask tough questions made our entry into the Iraq War inevitable. The important challenges to the administration's screwy rationale were never put forward. But it's a debatable point.

What's not debatable is that the press are absolute slaves to hot blondes. It's the Paris Hilton press effect. No matter how substance-free the subject, if she's got long blond hair, and she can be made up to look halfway decent, she can get as much attention as she wants, anytime. Paris herself may be an ingenious media critic: her interview with Larry King seemed willfully dull, as if she wanted to mock us all for tuning into an hour-long interview on a news network that ended up saying nothing.

Paris, Nicole, Britney, Tara Connor, the Olsen Twins, the list goes on. Even Lindsay Lohan went blond for a bit to maintain her profile. And now Miss New Jersey Amy Polumbo.

The story's pretty simple: An unnamed enemy of Amy's is threatening to publish photos of Amy ripped from her Facebook page, unless Amy relinquishes her title. But it seems like a non-story: Amy admits that the photos are no more racy than the shot of her in her red bikini from the pageant. They don't include nudity or show her drinking, she says.

And yet the press is going nuts over the story. (I'm not a reporter so I can blog about it with impunity.)

Of course I could be wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the photos are explosive...