Arianna has another Judy Miller roundup today. It’s interesting that the unacknowledged subtext in most of the Judy stories is, “Who did she fuck, and when did she fuck them?”

This is actually a pretty standard question for journalists. After all, public figures are cut from the same insane, adrenaline-driven cloth and more often then not, there’s a strong attraction. So if you’re not banging someone else on the newsroom staff (a slightly different newsroom hazard), you might have something going with a source.

Human nature being what it is, I don’t imagine newsrooms have changed all that much since I got out.

Traditionally, the hanky-panky is covered by the informal newsroom law: “It’s okay to sleep with the elephants as long as you don’t cover the circus.” More specifically, most papers have reporters sign an ethics agreement, some variation of “you can’t sleep with anyone until after the story runs.” (Some of them even specify how long the thwarted lovers must wait.) And if you’re seeing someone who may theoretically become the subject of a story, you have to notify your editor of the relationship.

Of course, if a newspaper is getting a lot of attention-grabbing headlines out of their reporter’s sexual activity, they tend to look the other way - until it becomes a liability.

Case in point: Philadelphia Inquirer political reporter Laura Foreman. She was rumored to be involved with then-city editor Max King, but at some point segued into an affair with the legendary South Philly pol Buddy Cianfrani. Here’s a recap from the American Journalism Review:

In 1977, Laura Foreman was ousted from her eight-month-old New York Times reporting job when it came to light that she had an ongoing intimate relationship with Pennsylvania state Sen. Henry J. “Buddy” Cianfrani, whom she had previously covered for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Inquirer editors, charged with having known about the relationship and allowing it to continue, assigned their Pulitzer Prize-winning team, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, to investigate. The paper published their mammoth 17,000-word piece on Foreman, the affair and the newsroom – way too much information or not enough, depending on one’s viewpoint. (Foreman and Cianfrani later married after the politico did time in jail for mail fraud and racketeering.)

Her Inky editors knew; of course they knew. From what I heard through the years, the powers that be at the Inky leaked the info after she went to work at the Times. Who knows? Newsrooms aren’t much different from the seventh-grade lunchroom.