USA Today is the ACT-UP of the newspaper industry. Last April 8 the paper outed Arthur Ashe, forcing him to reveal the fact that a 1983 blood transfusion left him HIV positive. USA Today also recently outed former television newscaster Linda Ellerbee, bullying her into a public discussion of her double mastectomy. As Ellerbee revealed during a Prime Time Live interview, a reporter called her assistant and asked, “Well, is it true she had to have both her t-ts cut off?”

Some journalists affect concern over the ethical state of their profession. Carl Bernstein said last year that he knew journalistic standards had deteriorated when he heard Diane Sawyer ask Maria Maples, “Was it the best sex you ever had?” But was it the newsworthiness of the guest or merely Sawyer’s question that bothered Bernstein, the reporter who built his career on the revelations of Deep Throat?

Few editors show even Bernstein’s concern. At the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors held a week after the Ashe story broke, only one editor (from the Philadelphia Inquirer) declared he would not have published the story without Ashe’s permission. The clear consensus was that, though Ashe had retired from professional tennis 13 years ago, he remained a “public figure” and therefore “fair game.” Ironically, it was Ashe’s role twenty years ago as a barrier-breaking black athlete that negated his right to privacy. A sportswriter in the Chicago Tribune even went so far as to claim the moral high ground for the press: “As unfair as it is to Ashe, the common good will be better served for knowing now [about his affliction] than later.”

Mr. Ashe saw things in a different light. “I didn’t commit any crimes,” he said at his news conference. “I’m not running for public office. I should be able to reserve the right to keep things like that private.” The New York Times responded to his lèse majesté by criticizing him for aiming “his barbs at the wrong target. . . . The real villainy lies in the cruel and benighted public attitudes that compelled Mr. Ashe to keep his disease secret. . . . ” That Ashe may have wanted to live a dignified and quiet life out of the public eye is a possibility the Times cannot understand. The “right to privacy” may cover women who wish to kill their babies, but it does not extend to role models, national heroes, and all dubiously honored as poster children of the cause of the day. In valuing his own needs and those of his family over and against the dictates of the herd, Ashe emulated Howard Roark instead of Magic Johnson and outraged the many Ellsworth Tooheys of our day.

But the problem with “outing” is not that it raises a conflict between the right of free speech and the right to privacy; it is a more fundamental problem of basic decency and good manners. Both are in decline, along with other characteristics of republican life. The true significance of the infamous letters of President Truman released last year was not that they unmasked him as a bigot. After all, few leaders in American history, and not even the Great Emancipator, believed in racial equality. But what the letters enabled us to glimpse was a crass and vulgar haberdasher whom the founders of the republic—farmers and merchants alike—would not have allowed in the front door.

In better days an editor who ran the Ashe story would have been challenged to a duel by his victim and tarred and feathered by his former subscribers. But USA Today has the largest general readership of any newspaper in the country. The American people not only have the government they deserve; we also have the newspaper we deserve.