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

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

Journalists, who are skeptical to begin with, simply do not like to be lied to or made fools of.

But the time has come for journalists to acknowledge that a zone of privacy does exist.

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and 80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.

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.

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