Rooney Riles Newswomen

Andy Rooney has taken steps to clear up a little wreck of his own.

The 60 Minutes curmudgeon set tongues wagging with a newspaper column this week that suggested that the most beautiful woman in TV news "looks as if she had been in a minor automobile accident" because of plastic surgery.

He didn't name any names. That's because, Rooney said Thursday, he wasn't talking about anybody.

"I was writing metaphorically," he said. "I didn't have anybody really in mind."

In his column about aging, Rooney said that most people are more attractive if they look their age instead of synthetically trying to improve their appearance. That's something many people in his business can't accept, he noted.

"One of the most beautiful, OK, the most beautiful, woman in television news had a job done on herself a few years ago and, while she doesn't look bad, she does not look the same or as good to me as when she had what must have seemed to her to be shortcomings," he wrote.

Gossip columnists and undoubtedly a few of Rooney's female colleagues immediately began the guessing game.

"I suppose there must be 20 women in television who thought I was talking about them," Rooney said.

Some speculated Rooney meant Diane Sawyer, his former colleague on 60 Minutes. Not so fast, the New York Post's Page Six opined on Thursday, tossing the names Barbara Walters, Christiane Amanpour, Maria Shriver, Jane Pauley, Lesley Stahl and Connie Chung into the mix.

With so many women to potentially offend, Rooney put a stop to it. He said he regretted writing it: "I didn't mean to call this much attention to myself."

And he offered a verbal bouquet to Sawyer.

"Diane is a good friend of mine and I like her a lot," he said. "I think she's not only one of the great people in television but she's one of the good people, too. She's as smart as she is beautiful."