Gotcha journalism is a dumb waste of time 

Jeff Jarvis likes the idea of exposing politicians with forked tongues. I usually agree with Jeff about most things, but I abhor the gotcha technique -- that practice of quoting back past inconsistent statements.

I think it leads to concentrating on the trivial. It contributes to the Washington littleness that Obama talked about in his Springfield speech yesterday.

It makes Hillary so afraid of echos of "I voted for it before I voted against it" that she won't give a straight answer. Pundit roundtables and strategists spend thousands of hours worrying about it. Just a waste of energy.

It causes journalists to forget what they learned in school about concentrating on the consequential. Pettiness is rampant. An example is hounding Tim Russert gave the New Orleans official who got a couple details wrong on a report about evacuation practices. Russert grilled Broussard on petty points and forgot to look at the big picture, that people in nursing homes died because the rescue coordination was messed up.

Often the pettiness is concocted by the political opposition, like the Rathergate nonsense, when journalists went right along with the picking apart of Dan Rather's evidence. They made it the story and overshadowed the bigger picture that never should have been in dispute: George Bush's military record didn't stack up when compared with Kerry's.

I've love to see a ceasefire on gotcha tactics. Since that's not going to happen, politicians could help by not taking it seriously. They could roll their eyes at petty questions. They could help change things by sticking up for each other. Wouldn't it be a kind thing, for example, for Obama or Edwards, when asked about Hillary's voting record on Iraq, to suggest that the media stop expending their breathe on anybody's Iraq vote, cast in a climate of deception, and spend their questions on what happens now?