If IE 6 can't display it right then CSS must be broken
Dave seems to be running into problems with IE 6 and CSS. Instead of putting in the efforts to fix it with Web Standards, he has chosen to follow the time tested adage of "Beat it to fit, paint it to match".
Dave had some spacing issue with his headlines (that only appeared in IE6/win), which were annoying. But in an attempt to fix it, he's thrown out the baby with the bath-water. He could have removed the structural elements that were giving him trouble form his CSS (i.e. the margins and paddings which set spacing between elements), but leave the font attributes. Instead he had a knee-jerk reaction that drove him back to the warm and comfortable confines of the font tags. Which is a shame because the Font tag has been deprecated by the W3C. In his attempt remove style tags, Dave has inadvertently removed the subtle gray line that divided each newsItem, and the ability to control their line-height, and kerning.
It would have been much better to fixed the right way. Why not leave in the Headline tags? Headlines are important because they give a page structure. Plus it would make the type bigger on browsers that don't understand the style attribute attached to it.
OK I admit that I have a hatred of the font tag, and if Dave had left that out it would not have even registered on my radar. But when it's accompanied with comments like "It's time to punt on CSS", it's extra disappointing. If the web professionals decide to give up on standards based practices then where is the incentive for Microsoft, or IE users, to upgrade.