The etiquette gap: From Newt and Mitt to Facebook and texting

And then there's Gisele Bundchen, wife of the losing Super Bowl quarterback Tom Brady, and the uproar over her defense of her husband's performance: Was she taunting? A protective wife? A poor loser? Whatever she was, she was not polite. Though ever closer press coverage may be revealing trash-talking that always existed below the sports radar, what's new, observes Mr. Lyon, is "the player who made a three-yard gain hopping around like he just won [the Super Bowl]. It's not enough to beat your opponent, but now you have to take his manhood from him."

As more loosely defined "press" replete with blogs, tweets, talk radio, and anonymous Web content encroaches on traditional reporting, standards of accountability and attribution suffer. On talk radio, "whoever talks the loudest wins the argument," Lyon says.

Still, good sportsmanship is out there, says Lyon. He calls the end of the annual Army-Navy football game "the best five minutes in sports," as bitter rivals, and soon-to-be-brothers in-arms, cross the field to sing the others' alma mater. There are the Olympic gold medal winners, who routinely invite fellow medalists to share the winner's platform after the playing of the national anthem. And he cites boxing, "the most violent sport you can imagine," where the victor pays homage to his opponent by raising their arms together. "These are the most gracious sort of winners."

What would Cronkite do?

For many, the "where-was-his-mother?" honors go to the national spectacle that is politics. "Until the mid-1990s, candidates didn't talk about other candidates lying," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. They instead would say that a particular statement was untrue. Now, civilities are eroding even at the highest levels, she observes. Once unheard of, network interviewers have interrupted presidents of both parties in recent years. Professor Jamieson says that vulgarities such as "screw you" or "suck" are also "sliding in" to the political dialogue. Personal integrity, she adds, is being impugned left and right and neither side is policing its own.

On the floor of the US House of Representatives, for instance, members of each party have charged opponents by name with wanting seniors to "die." Rep. Joe Wilson (R) of South Carolina shouted "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress in September 2009.

And from the floor of Congress, Democrats over the years have repeatedly charged President George W. Bush with lying.

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