The Wall Street Journal has a thought-provoking opinion piece on what the author calls the nation’s “Peeping Tom pandemic.” It cites the publication of Gov. Mark Sanford’s emails to his mistress, ambulance photos of Michael Jackson and home sale prices on Zillow.

I’m surprised the author didn’t mention the painful breakup of Jon & Kate.

Author Jennifer Graham’s criticism focuses mainly on newspapers.  “Surveying recent coverage,” she writes, “we may assume that a rental-car agent in Pamplico, S.C., has the right — yea, the need — to know about an Argentine woman’s tan lines, the contents of a dead singer’s stomach, or the minutiae of anyone’s divorce. Clever wordsmiths can justify any revelation, no matter how embarrassing or trite. But newspapers ignore the human cost at their own risk.”

She also says, “Newspapers are in decline because of the Internet, but there are few mourners outside of their newsrooms. Too many smart and decent people have had their “Absence of Malice” moments: mornings when they opened their newspapers and saw something written about them that made them want to run through the neighborhood, picking up every newspaper they saw.”

Maybe that’s why Jon and Kate aren’t mentioned: That peeping was done by a television audience.

I confess that I haven’t read the email exchanges and haven’t looked at the ambulance photos. But I have looked at home sale prices, and have been involved in publishing prices on stltoday.com.

I think the piece raises important issues. Graham lost me, though, when she focused on newspapers rather than on the full landscape of information out there.