For decades, White House press briefings were for journalists’ eyes only — the daily sparring a sort of private family argument. Polished, edited versions of events were reported on the evening news or in the next day’s newspapers, with little sense of whether the climate was hot or cold.

But as cable news took hold in the mid-1990s, the White House eventually opened these workday sessions to live video and audio feeds. The public now has a front-row seat. And on a daily basis, the tapes and the transcripts get pored over and rehashed by journalists, political operatives and legions of bloggers.

So given this new environment, is it a good career move for a reporter to call the president’s spokesman a jerk?

It has been more than a month since David Gregory, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, lost his cool with White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan during the non-televised, pre-briefing “gaggle,” where reporters were complaining about the lax information provided about Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting accident in Texas. The tension boiled over as McClellan kept repeating administration talking points as if they were Gregorian chants. In years past, Gregory’s grilling wouldn’t have merited a blip on the media radar. But in the age of the laptop press critic, a star was born in the blogosphere.

“Hold on,” McClellan reportedly said to Gregory, after the reporter raised his voice in asking a question. “The cameras aren’t on right now. You can do this later.”

“Don’t accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras,” Gregory shot back. “Don’t be a jerk to me personally when I’m asking you a serious question.” Gregory then continued to press McClellan aggressively at the televised briefing a couple of hours later, a session that resembled an episode of “Hannity & Colmes.”

Since then, Gregory’s star has risen. He was profiled last week in the Style section of The Washington Post, which tagged Gregory as “the Sam Donaldson of the Bush years.” In the blogosphere, he’s been championed by the left (for asking tough questions) and vilified on the right (for being rude when asking tough questions). Gregory was given a guest spot on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to apologize. But when he called Don Imus’ broadcast from the president’s road trip to India and giggled as he tried to speak Hindi, Imus cracked, “Are you drunk?” From that point on, half of blog-reading America became convinced that Gregory was looped.

“What you had was a reporter who had inserted himself into a news story for the second occasion in a matter of weeks,” said Robert Bluey, editor of Human Events Online, a conservative publication. Another conservative bought the domain www.firedavidgregory.com and posted an open letter to NBC Universal Chairman Bob Wright.

Calls to Gregory were referred to NBC Universal spokeswoman Barbara Levin. “If you listen to Imus, you know there is absolutely nothing behind it other than this is what he does. Last week, he asked Terry Bradshaw if he was drunk, too,” she said in an e-mail.

Relations between the press and the presidents have been tense for decades. When CBS News’ Dan Rather stood to ask Richard Nixon a question at a National Association of Broadcasters convention in 1974, Rather got applause. “Are you running for something?” Nixon quipped. Rather shot back with, “No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?” The CBS switchboard lit up.

As late as the Reagan administration, reporters could use information from the briefings but not record audio or video. By the time Bill Clinton came in, only the first five minutes at the beginning of the briefing could be broadcast. Press Secretary Mike McCurry gradually increased the amount of time that could be broadcast until the entire event was fair game.

McCurry now believes that he should have put limits on those live broadcasts. “It’s become too much a stage for both sides to play out their perceived grievances,” he said in an interview. “Once they were on live, reporters were right there, and their editors were in the bureau watching them. It really became a place where there was posturing.” During the Monica Lewinsky episode, media outlets started to show the briefings live and even sent two cameras — one to focus on McCurry and one on the reporter posing the question.

McCurry said he’s been called worse names than “jerk,” but the exchanges weren’t posted on the Internet by bloggers for the world to see. “I had exactly the same shouting matches with David Bloom,” he noted of Gregory’s predecessor.

The public push for transparency makes it unlikely that the White House briefing room will ever go dark again, or that transcripts will ever again be limited to journalists. Nor should they. But journalists need to understand that removing the editorial filter on the news also removes the filter on the reporting process.

And reporting, just like life, is sometimes a messy mix of human foibles, mistakes in judgment and overheated tempers. Only now, the world is invited into the kitchen for the family fight.

Contributing editor Elizabeth Wasserman is a Washington freelance writer. She can be reached at ewasserman@cq.com.