OKC is a dating website, and some people are only looking for casual sex, so it does not surprise me that looks are more important than text, nor is this a bad thing. After all, whatever you write is going to attract some people and repel others, which largely cancels out, while beauty is more objective and will attract/repel everyone to a highly correlated degree. If you compared individual ratings rather than collapsing across all visitors (which seems to be what they did) than words would have a far greater effect.
Also, people looking for sex will (I imagine) rate many profiles and play a numbers game, whereas those looking for love spend far more time on individual messages. In the time it takes to asses one persons personality you can judge dozens of peoples looks. This means that there is a sampling bias in ratings, weighted towards people who judge based on looks.
The recent OKCupid blog, which gwern mentioned in Media Open Thread, investigated the impact of three different factors on users' perceptions of each other: authority (reported match %), profile text (present or absent), and looks.
On the bright side, the authority versus reality match-up came out tied:
If you don't consider that a good outcome, you're not yet sufficiently cynical.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are a thousand words worth?
... Approximately nothing.
And the winner is...