Last week I published a book called All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. It’s about the five days in 1987 when Sen. Gary Hart, the presumed Democratic nominee for president, was felled by the first political sex scandal of the satellite age, and how that collision of politics and celebrity reverberated in our public life—and in the life of a complicated and compelling man—for many years after. At the core of the book is the retelling of an infamous stakeout, in which reporters from the Miami Herald hid outside Hart’s Washington home in order to catch him with a younger woman who was not his wife.

On the day the book came out, Tom Fiedler, who was the Herald’s lead reporter on the story, offered a gracious but pointed rebuttal to the book. I’ve been reluctant to respond, because I feel like the book speaks for itself, and because I don’t want an arcane debate over journalism ethics to obscure the larger story at the core of the book. As anyone who’s read All the Truth Is Out knows, it is a work of literary nonfiction, not a manifesto or a screed.

But Fiedler, an accomplished journalist who went on to run the Herald and who is now dean of Boston University’s College of Communications, raises some fundamental questions about what we do as political journalists and what we owe the public. And the differences we have on those questions should be debated, even if they can’t easily be resolved.

In his piece, Fiedler, who admits he can’t help but be a little biased in all of this, offers several, somewhat disconnected arguments. He reaches back to Alexander Hamilton and Grover Cleveland to make the point that reporters have always investigated the seamier side of moral character and the Hart story didn’t really change much at all. (OK, except that the expressly partisan media in the 1800s was really more like a series of oppo-research firms than the media we know today, with its pretension to objectivity, and back then a congressman could still get his skull bashed in on the House floor, so I’m not sure that’s really the standard we want to be using.)

Fiedler dismisses the significance of the infamous and misremembered “follow me around” quote attributed to Hart; he writes that while he and his colleagues hadn’t seen that specific quote when they decided to put Hart under surveillance, Hart had made plenty of similar statements in the weeks prior, so it didn’t matter. (In fact, Hart said all kind of things in an effort to dismiss speculation about his personal life, but none of them could possibly be construed as an invitation to spy on his bedroom. So the popular version of the story—that it was Hart, and not the media, who decided to rewrite the rules of privacy by issuing his ill-advised challenge—simply isn’t true.)

But the real crux of Fiedler’s case comes near the end of his response. After making the point that in his view there can be no such thing in politics as an “inconsequential lie,” Fiedler writes: “To me, the question that Bai and others raise shouldn’t be why the news media reported on Hart’s activities, but why it failed to report on FDR, JFK and LBJ.”

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, that this argument directly contradicts Fiedler’s earlier point about the Hart scandal not marking any kind of historical departure. Either Hart was held to the same standard as every other national candidate throughout American history, or Fiedler and his colleagues were crossing boundaries that reporters in the 1930s and 1960s weren’t willing to traverse, but both things can’t actually be true at the same time.

Be that as it may, Fiedler’s statement here is remarkable, and it highlights, I think, our fundamental difference on the issue.

Sure, there are times when the personal behavior of presidents and candidates rises to the level of actual recklessness and relevance to governance. Had John Kennedy’s liaison with a mobster’s girlfriend been known (and, in fact, the FBI knew, if not the media), it should have been disclosed. Bill Clinton’s perjury and the criminal investigation into his behavior left reporters little choice but to report on his affair with Monica Lewinsky. I wrestle with all of this in the book.

But Fiedler’s not talking about extraordinary circumstances. His conviction, apparently, is that every president and presidential candidate should have been subject to the same scrutiny as Hart—up to and including covert surveillance and invasive questioning about his sexual history. He is suggesting that some reporter probably should have followed Franklin Roosevelt to Warm Springs and discovered him cavorting with Lucy Mercer Rutherford. And that some intrepid reporter should have been asking all of these men whether they had ever cheated on their wives, as the Washington Post’s Paul Taylor asked Hart directly during a stunning confrontation in 1987.