The news that fits its times

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.