Support for this On The Media podcast comes from Audible.com, provider of digital audio books and more, across all types of literature, including fiction, nonfiction, and periodicals.

More at audiblepodcast.com slash on the media.

From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And here's Michelle Bachman.

And it started in Iowa.

You've done it, Iowa.

Thank you. With last week's Iowa Strawpole, an event of no historical significance, the presidential campaign of 2012 is well underway.

The straw poll drew flocks of reporters, mostly because, like Everest, it was there.

Pity the poor campaign reporter, dogging the steps of scripted politicians desperate for that rare unscripted

moment, that moment known as the gaff. Think John McCain not knowing how many houses he owned.

Some gaffs get repeated over and over again in the press and the blogosphere. They stick to

candidates like tar, while others leave

no trace. Why? The American prospects Paul Waldman has a theory. He says reporters cover the

gaffs that reinforce the conclusions they've already made about a candidate. Candidates end up getting

defined by their most prominent character flaw, and the GAF is one of the primary ways that reporters communicate that to us, essentially by saying, see, this thing that I've been thinking about this guy all the time, it's true, and here's the evidence.

Basically, you're saying reporters are on Freudian slip patrol.

To a great extent they are. And now we have

this entire apparatus to encourage them in that. So every candidate is being followed around by people

who are hired by their opponents campaigns or by the other party with cameras whose job essentially

is to try to find that gap, to be there when it happens. Can we quickly run through some of the current contenders and their gaps, beginning with the

...