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

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.

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.

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

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 networks found themselves having to compete for an increasingly Balkanized audience.