And what it depends on, of course, is whether the story itself is worth the ethical compromise it requires and whether the competition is onto the story.

In exchange for power, influence, command and a place in history, a president gives up the bulk of his privacy.

Most journalists now believe that a person's privacy zone gets smaller and smaller as the person becomes more and more powerful.

For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance.

Given what the media have put the country through this past decade, it must come as a surprise to most Americans that the press has a code of ethics.

The relationship between press and politician - protected by the Constitution and designed to be happily adversarial - becomes sour, raw and confrontational.

As electronic journalism came to be evaluated for its cost effectiveness, the network world began breaking up.