Inquiring minds

Here are some things we learned this week: Barack Obama still smokes the occasional cigarette when his children aren’t looking. Richard M. Nixon thought abortion might be a “necessary” option to deal with interracial pregnancies. And South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford flew to Argentina to meet his girlfriend and was not out hiking the Appalachian Trail, as his aides had told reporters.

Those are three very different stories -- adultery, racism and sneaking a cigarette hardly register on the same moral plane -- but here’s what they share: In each case, a public official had a piece of information that he would have preferred to keep private, and in each case the news media saw fit to look deeper and ferret it out. Nixon lost the battle to keep the White House tapes secret years ago, and thousands of hours of private, often embarrassing conversations have been dribbling out ever since. To get the Sanford story, a reporter, acting on a tip, ambushed the governor at the airport on Wednesday when he returned from Argentina, leaving him little choice but to confess his infidelity. As for the Obama smoking revelation, that too involved an unwanted look into a public man’s private life.

“You just think it’s neat to ask me about my smoking as opposed to it being relevant to my new law,” Obama said in what was described as an “irritated” tone. “But that’s fine. I understand. It’s an interesting ... human interest story.”

And so it was. But is every interesting story fair game? Journalists have wrestled with how to cover such things for as long as there’s been journalism, and they’ve often made a mess of it. (See, for instance, Anthony Trollope’s description of Quintus Slide, the slime-bag editor of the People’s Banner, in his 1873 novel, “Phineas Redux.”)

For two of this week’s stories, the calculus was easy. The Obama cigarette sensation was lighthearted, and it was relevant (given that the president had just signed a new tobacco regulation bill into law). Americans want to know if Obama is smoking partly because it’s naughty and human, but also because he had promised to stop. And while his failure to do so may be a bit embarrassing, it’s hardly injurious to point it out. That’s the kind of privacy, let’s face it, that one gives up when one becomes president. As his comments made clear, even Obama recognizes that.

Publishing the Nixon conversations was once controversial, but no longer. The man’s dead, for one thing. And he taped his own conversations, thereby acknowledging their historical value himself. It’s true that Nixon’s anti-Semitism and racism are barely newsworthy anymore. But still, history is history, and if the tapes help flesh out the character of our 37th president, there’s not much argument left for withholding them.

The harder call, as always, is about sex. When and what should we report about our leaders’ sexual lives? In the old days, extramarital affairs by politicians such as the Kennedys were sometimes covered up by the press corps. It was a clubby thing, the gentlemanly approach. These days, however, such stories are less likely to be quashed, especially if the media can tie the infidelity to, say, a sexual-harassment suit or allegations of abuse of power, or some sort of hypocrisy beyond the mere breaking of marriage vows.

For instance, the media are a lot more likely to write about your arrest in a men’s room sex sting if you’ve voted against gay-rights legislation. (Yes, that’s you, former Sen. Larry Craig.) Hiring a prostitute is against the law, so you make yourself vulnerable if you’re caught with one. (Especially if you’ve prosecuted them in the past, like former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.) Whatever you choose to do, don’t lie about it to investigators. (President Clinton’s lying, or fudging, did not serve him well.) And keep your hands off of underage congressional pages and interns. (Former Reps. Dan Crane and Gerry Studds.)

But those are the easy calls. A harder case was that of House Judiciary Chairman Henry J. Hyde’s 33-year-old affair. (Not an affair with a 33-year-old, mind you, but an affair that had occurred 33 years earlier.) It was reported in 1998 by the online magazine Salon while Hyde was spearheading impeachment proceedings against Clinton. Many readers found it irrelevant because Hyde had broken no laws and his offense had been dredged up from the distant past.

Los Angeles -- and The Times -- had to grapple with the question of when to invade a politician’s privacy in 2007 when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was the subject of rumors, Internet reports and, eventually, a story in the L.A. Daily News about his love life. The day that story appeared, the mayor held a news conference confirming that he was having an affair with Telemundo anchorwoman Mirthala Salinas.

Was this newsworthy simply because Villaraigosa was cheating on his wife and the public loves salacious details? Was it that his paramour was a journalist who sometimes covered him? Was it newsworthy at all? Some people thought the mayor’s personal life had been invaded by nosy news media; others thought he got off easy.

So where does that leave us with Sanford? His story unfolded in a way that made it impossible not to report: He disappeared and couldn’t be located for several days. It was propelled onto the front pages by several delicious facts: Sanford, as a House member, had voted for the Clinton impeachment; he is a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative who visited his girlfriend in Argentina at least once on taxpayer dollars; and he was a potential 2012 presidential contender. What’s more, his revelation of infidelity came just days after that of Nevada Sen. John Ensign, which meant it fell into a category journalists particularly love -- the trend story.

One thing that seems clear is that the more such stories are reported, the less shocking they’ll be. Gary Hart felt he had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race after his dalliance with Donna Rice became public, but four years later, Clinton survived the primaries despite the revelation of his relationship with Gennifer Flowers. Villaraigosa just won a second term. So did San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, despite the revelation of his affair.

The media, in the end, will report what the community wants to know -- or what it thinks the community wants to know. If people stop caring about such news, newspapers, television and even bloggers will grow increasingly blase as well. That’s the way it’s always worked.