Unless you’re Fox.

For Palin, yeah. They’re ideological hacks. Even MSNBC, which has hired and/or elevated some ideological hacks (Maddow, Olberman) isn’t near Fox (yet, maybe).

I’ll just reiterate here, that I don’t even think most of the Couric questions were asked specifically to trip her up. This is very subjective so reasonable people can disagree but it seems to me most of them were of the “getting to know you and your positions variety” and were quite predictable at that. How can a question be a verbal trap when you *expect* it? Most of Palin’s stumbles came during the follow up question. I suppose you could argue that Couric was trapping her in that sense: by not letting Palin get away with obviously rehearsed talking points.

and it’s the connotation here that bothers me, most people think gotcha questions are unfair or slanted, purposefully designed to trip up a candidate to garner ratings just as you have alluded

It doesn’t mean unfair at all (as I have said at least once, I am not crying ‘foul’), so far as I am concerned. It means ‘there to trip you up’, as I use it, and if I were a political journalist and I thought I could get a moment like that, I’d use it, personally (if I were interviewing Biden, I’d try to bait him into saying something impolitic; with Obama or McCain, I’d put much less effort into it as they are somewhat less likely, even though they have both stumbled on occasion, to say something daft). Also, of course, I am not suggesting that it was just a barrage of those questions…

Seriously, how do you fuck up “what do you read?”

Heh.

If the media retroactively treated her answers to those questions as though they were “gotcha” moments — and it’s the connotation here that bothers me, most people think gotcha questions are unfair or slanted, purposefully designed to trip up a candidate to garner ratings just as you have alluded — it’s because SHE turned them into a “gotcha” moment. Seriously, how do you fuck up “what do you read?” Her Couric interview was entirely self-inflicted. She couldn’t coherently string sentences together and that’s NOT an exaggeration.

I’m not complaining about it — it’s all fair game — but observing that McCain’s team made a strategic mistake in their handling of her. With so few early interviews, and such a delay before they were even given at all, the effect of flubs was much magnified; even if you think that the interviews weren’t intended to provide more of those moments than a normal interview, much of the rest of the media used them that way. Again, I’m not crying foul — all elements of the media know their market, and that’s trending Democrat-wards since before 2006 and Obama-wards this year and I don’t begrudge them their chance to earn a living — just observing how I see it. I think that the McCain campaign would have been far better advised to get her doing more interviews early on (note that now she’s doing more press stuff and doing much better overall, with mistakes being diluted by the other stuff).