Unethical or the new normal?

When Mayhill Fowler published the comments of then presidential candidate Barack Obama at a closed to the press campaign event, where the candidate said its not surprising that small town workers "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Fowler was not supposed to be at the event during which Obama made those remarks, but that didn't stop her from publishing them to the Huffington Post website. Her editors found that publishing the remarks were ethically sound. 

Six weeks later, Fowler repeated her feat of getting seemingly off-the-record remarks to go viral with recording President Bill Clinton to call a Vanity Fair writer "slimy" and "dishonest." 

In both occurrences, Fowler failed to disclose that she was a journalist to Clinton and Obama. In both occurrences, Fowler published the remarks without ethical qualms from her editors. 

Call me old-fashioned but I believe that catching these unguarded moments is a form of gotcha journalism and is largely unethical. While I wouldn't go as far as this blogger in calling her a "manipulative hack," but sneaking into private events to try to catch a Presidential candidate in a rare moment of honesty seems slightly unethical to me.

At the same time, Fowler's reporting seems reminiscent of the comment made by presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, when he said 47 percent of people were dependent on government services and would vote for Obama no matter what.

So, were Fowler's actions actually unethical? Or am I instead biased towards her more dubious reporting techniques because of how they affected a candidate from the political party I identify with?