Slate’s Jack Shafer had a thoughtful column up on Friday regarding last week’s Weinergate shenanigans. In it, Shafer makes a counterintuitive argument—at least for a media critic—that the mainstream media should not be torturing itself about whether or not it should be covering the Weiner Tweets, but whether or not it is giving the “scandal” enough coverage. In the age of Gawker and The Daily Show, the question of what makes news is settled—and it’s not what the New York Times decides. Scandal is here to stay, and coverage of the sensational is a necessary guard against irrelevance—the now perennial example of National Inquirer/John Edwards is cited.

Concluding after his fine rumination on the inexorable move of sensationalism into the mainstream, Shafer writes:

If Eugene Meyer were alive to view Irina Shayk wearing a string bikini on the cover of Sports Illustrated or read a story about Lady Gaga in his Washington Post, he’d probably have the common sense to rewrite his principles to read, “In matters that lend themselves to sensationalism, worry less about ‘too much’ coverage than ‘not enough.’”

The point here is that in the media, the once “outré” often can become very much the standard. And quickly. Shafer delves a little into the history of attitudes towards sensationalism for his piece, outlining the slippery ethical game some newspapers once played, in a pre-Internet age, where—for fear a large advertiser might get all red-faced and pull ad pages at the sight of any inches given to a too-sordid scandal—reporters dug for the most salacious details and wrote them up in the most coded, banal ways. Eugene Meyer gets name-checked because his set of ethical codes, once published on the front page of The Washington Post, are cited as particularly irrelevant to today’s reporting world.

Considering two of the principles—“As a disseminator of news, the paper shall observe the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman” and “What it prints shall be fit reading for the young as well as the old”—Shafer writes:

As fusty as the principles may sound today, I can remember them being quoted in earnest over the phone by a Washington Post managing editor in the early 1990s (Hi, Bob!) who was answering my questions about Post coverage. I’m sure that “the decencies that are obligatory upon a private gentleman” was easily interpreted in the 1930s. What it means today, I have no idea. A private gentleman does not ask impertinent questions. He does not compile dossiers on other citizens. He rarely attempts to find evidence that would get a senator or CEO thrown in jail. Post gentlemen and gentlewomen do this daily.

And:

The second of the two principles—read in any decade, past or future—sounds paternalistic and patronizing because it is. But you can see the appeal. By promising to keep the Post and its readers out of the gutter, the Meyer principles short-leash those reporters and editors who might want to explore the territories where squalor and turpitude thrive. In practice, the Post and every other “quality” daily in the country evade Meyerian principles by writing in code when reporting stories about adultery, degeneracy, iniquity, vice, and the other human mainstays. If you know the code, you’re exposed to the filth and the fury.

Joel Meares is a former CJR assistant editor.