You can emphasize someone's facial features to look bad just as easily as you can de-emphasize/smooth them to make the person look better. I am almost positive photographers who work for rag magazines do this a lot. Having said that, I'm not an Ellen fan (used to be) and am not interested in her tax break project.
Good point about the ability of photographers. I think that she just looks like a lot of average 66-67 years old do. Maybe she is a sun lover living in California.
