No matter what name we give it or how we judge it, a candidate's character is central to political reporting because it is central to a citizen's decision in voting.

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

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.

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

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

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

Sexual behavior was also generally considered off limits.

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

The written tone and the spoken tone change and the reporters' disbelief in the veracity of the government spreads to the readers and the viewers.

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.

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

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.

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

Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.