I don’t know Amy Jacobson. Never met her, never watched her while she was reporting on Chicago TV, haven’t spoken with her lawyer, or her bosses, or her friends.

But reading about her in the newspapers lately, listening to the pub gossip around here – and there’s been plenty of that – I think she’s getting a professional shiv.

She’s the one, you’ll recall, who was fired from the NBC affiliate here and is suing the local CBS TV station for a million dollars. She’s claiming that a tape CBS aired of her in a bathing suit at the home of a potential news source in July 2007 subjected her to “enormous public humiliation and disgrace”.

Well, I guess it did. I saw that silly tape only because it aired again, and then again, and yet again on local news last year. I check local TV news to get the weather and to know what part of town has blown its electricity. Other than that, there isn’t much about happy chat with a spit-combed guy, a smiley girl, and a jocular jock that appeals.

But the other night I was having dinner with two women journalist friends and they spoke of Amy Jacobsen. Both women, oddly enough – given that they are both veteran print reporters – said they disapproved of Jacobson. Something about how she should not have interviewed a source “in that outfit.”

What? She was wearing a bathing suit. She was near a swimming pool. According to print reports, she was on her way to a health club when she’d gotten a sudden call and a chance for a scoop. What is this business about “outfits”?

I have been a journalist for 40 years. I am OLD, and quite possibly cranky. But since when has it been the object of a good reporter to wear the right “outfit” when she’s after a possible scoop? Or even not a scoop. Maybe she’s working on a personal, in-depth (oh, excuse me, we’re talking about TV here, aren’t we?) revealing, even newsworthy story?

We’re not talking about getting scoops from the guy on the pillow next to you, which goes into another whole sector of reporting lore. We’ll discuss that in a minute. But a bathing suit by a pool? What about it?

To write a story on a prostitution ring, I once walked the streets of this city for a week with an obliging hooker, and I wasn’t wearing something I would wear to the opera.

Part of getting a source to talk to you, to trust you in a way, to get close in human terms, is not to be adversarial but to be there and listening at any time the source feels like confiding. Always, of course, to be aware of the difference between getting close and getting co-opted.

Yes, there have been those who haven’t been enough aware of the difference. With women reporters especially – and I’m not begging special privilege here – it has always been especially tricky. As Georgie Anne Geyer – a fine columnist – once wrote when we both were commenting on a case involving a colleague of mine: “It has long been obvious to me that a woman journalist suffers a double whammy. No source tells a male journalist not to come back for information because she won’t sleep with him.”

Well, that was 30 years ago, and it had to do with the case of Laura Foreman, a political writer on the Philadelphia Inquirer , who fell in love with a powerful – if, in my opinion, sleazy – operator in the machine politics of Philadelphia. And continued to write stories about him, even though it was well-known in political circles that they shared an apartment.

During the investigation of ethics (the paper was investigating its own) I was the only woman in the newsroom who defended Laura. She had, she assured me, always told the editors about the stage of her romance. And the editors shrugged. Laura was getting good stories.

After the feds indicted the guy, there was much journalistic angst. Laura was fired off her new job with the New York Times when it all came out. The then managing editor of the Times – the famous and not-always-lovable Abe Rosenthal – uttered the ultimate closure on that one: “You don’t cover the circus if you’re (doing something sexually strenuous) with the elephants.”

Well, that was a long time ago. And since then there have been many other reporters who have had to figure out where story-collecting ended and conflict began. Not only with women. Bernard Weinraub of the New York Times finally recused himself from covering the movies when he married Columbia Pictures President Amy Pascal.

Sometimes the co-option dilemma is not so clear. What are we to make of Judith Miller, for instance, and her special deal with the likes of Scooty Libby, which had some part in leading us to war? What about the Washington Press Corps and its cozy dinners with government sources in Georgetown?

When does a “scoop” become an ethics violation?

Somehow, the tee-hee tape of Amy Jacobson in her bathing suit doesn’t seem to – excuse me here – hold much water when compared with the high tides elsewhere, does it?

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Dorothy Storck, a regular weekly columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer,and nominated several times for Pulitzers, is one of Chicago’s most celebrated journalists who as a foreign correspondent interviewed a number of world leaders including then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.