The dynamics between the press and presidents have gone through many twists and turns over the decades.

If you believe that tensions and passionate views about how the news media operate are a recent phenomena, you’re dead wrong.

Author Rudyard Kipling once described a good reporter as “the noblest work of God.”

I’ve used that line a few times, and, not surprisingly, it was greeted with laughs and catcalls. Maybe we should modify the quotation and call ourselves the “second noblest work of God,” and, in the process, let everyone speculate on which is first. While reveling in our Kiplingism, however, we are reminded that the French poet Baudelaire had a much different viewpoint. “I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”

As a French major, I knew there was a reason why I never cared for Baudelaire’s writings.

Periodically, we become part of the story we are covering. The latest example was CNN’s Jim Acosta, who was stripped of his White House credentials for a few days for allegedly accosting a White House assistant who was trying to take the microphone from him during a presidential news conference.

ABC’s Sam Donaldson and UPI’s Helen Thomas were among other famous watchdogs who held presidential feet to the fire.

The presidency is conducted by human beings, who, to be successful, must combine in the right way many seeming contradictory qualities — worldliness and idealism, toughness and charity, humanity and self-confidence, enthusiasm and restraint, and skepticism rather than cynicism.

The president’s every exploit is mirrored and chronicled largely in print, broadcast and social media, so it is easy to praise or blame the media for an administration’s successes or failures.

The road to the White House is pockmarked with potholes, as 20 failed candidates in 2016 will readily admit. But even for the survivor who eventually resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., other events can conspire to test the occupant’s true mettle.

How many lives does President Donald Trump have? He certainly has dodged his share of obstacles since announcing his candidacy in 2015. Trump is just the latest in a long list of presidents or contenders who have had to fend off unfavorable public disclosures.

President Bill Clinton’s affair in the White House starting in 1995 with intern Monica Lewinsky led to his impeachment for lying to a grand jury under oath, but he was ultimately acquitted.

In 1987, former U.S. Senator for Colorado Gary Hart, once the presidential front-runner, self-destructed when he challenged journalists to follow him. They did and blew the whistle on his affair with Donna Rice aboard Hart’s boat Monkey Business.

That same year, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware sought the Democratic nomination for president, but his candidacy went down in flames when he admitted he had plagiarized materials in law school and had hyped his credentials.

Do our political servants today have more scandals than their predecessors, or is it that today’s media are more probing? The answer is complex. For one thing, political ethics seem to change with the wind. What might be perceived to be scandalous in one era is business as usual in another.

In 1836, we elected Richard M. Johnson as vice president even though he fathered two children by his black live-in girlfriend.

In 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland of New York was accused of seducing a widow, fathered her child, refused to marry her and paid her off.

Why the intense scrutiny now? Haven’t the media in the past looked the other way, especially in the dalliances of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy?

Perhaps the national press’s appetite for scandal is more voracious because of competition and the public’s expectation and demand for this type of news.

Virtually no one wrote of Kennedy’s philandering until after his death in 1963. Actually, it is more accurate to say that no one wrote about it until the Chappaquiddick incident 50 years ago in 1969, which ended Ted Kennedy’s presidential aspirations.

Since Chappaquiddick, it’s been no-holds-barred for politicians and their indiscretions, which are now fair game for public dissemination and spotlight by a much more aggressive and less complicit news media.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com