A staple of so-called “gotcha” journalism — in which news reporters seem to celebrate the missteps of politicians — is the gaffe, the wrong words spoken at the wrong time, the off-base comment, the politically insensitive offhand remark.

So it is that talkative people like Sen. Joe Biden are called gaffe-prone by the news media, and other candidates may be kept under wraps by campaign managers. Witness the decision that Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has avoided unchoreographed interviews with the press until now. [Her first network interview is scheduled this week, with Charles Gibson of ABC.]

I was reflecting on the way journalists make sport of politicians as I leafed through the Des Moines Register. On page 6A of Saturday’s paper was a 27-inch jump of a story keyed back to page 1A. Only there was no such story on the first page or anywhere else in the paper.

The gaffe-prone were on my mind as I read a Sunday column about a ballpark memorial service for an 84-year-old fellow. The columnist wrote that the deceased had attended 10,500 baseball games of the Iowa Cubs and Iowa Oaks, minor league franchises of the Chicago Cubs and other big-league teams in Des Moines over the past 40 years. Never mind that the total of home games in those years was less than 3,000 or that to attend 10,500 of anything you’d have to do so 150 times a year for 70 years.

The gaffes of other public figures came to mind as I watched a television news obituary on a university colleague, a great guy named Dean Wright; the text on the TV news story identified him as “Dean Davis.”

The tendency of politicians to speak unintelligibly came to mind as I read this lead on a high school football story: “Marion offensive lineman Drew Clark swings his 280-pound body across the field in a gravity-bending arc.” I defy you to make sense of that. And a friend pointed out that when the local paper changed page design the editor in chief assured readers, “Our copy editors will write the main and secondary headlines even more intentionally…”

So here’s the deal: How about if those covering the presidential campaigns began to pay less attention to political gaffes, focused on political issues and tried to get their own house in order. That is unlikely, of course, given the way newspapers continue to lay off and buy out staff, and there are fewer and fewer copy editors and other gatekeepers to make sense of news stories before they are foisted off on readers.

The recourse is to keep one’s own list of press gaffes to provide some context for news coverage of gaffe-prone politicians and the pot calling the kettle black. Finding such errors is as easy as shoeing fish in a bar roll.