Matt's takedown of Tim Russert's "tough," which is to say, trivial, questioning, is well worth a read. Russert's obsession with getting people to say things that are embarrassing rather than illuminating is enormously trivializing to politics, and all the more pernicious because his program is what passes for "serious" discussion in Washington. He's not the laggard, he's the model.
And so his attitude spreads. If you watch Hardball, you get the Chris Matthews' selling point, which is that he'll personally rip a politician's throat out if they try and spin you. It's all part and parcel of this contempt for politicians and desire to expose them not for being uninformed, gripped by crazed and wrong ideas, but for being politician-y. For engaging in the sort of spin and doubletalk and evasions that they've adopted in order to, well, survive Chris Matthews and Tim Russert. You can see it in the debate Russert just moderated, where the big story out of it was that Hillary was a bit clumsy in finessing an answer, not that Hillary (or anyone else) offered the wrong answer.
One could imagine a gotcha journalism that was actually very important. Jeff Stein engaged in it when he began asking politicians about the difference between a Sunni and Shiite, and which sect Osama bin Laden identified, and why it all mattered. Those questions probe the familiarity of pols with the dynamics critical for actual policy making. By contrast, Tim Russert's famous gotcha of Howard Dean -- "How many men and women do we now have on active duty?" -- was actually meaningless. If Dean had known the precise answer, it would have told you literally nothing about his plans for the military, his attitude towards national security, his plans for Iraq. It was simply a data point Russert could tag Dean for not knowing, and that could then be replayed on other shows, thus underscoring Russert's reputation for toughness. But that's the point, right?
