Interesting piece by Craig Fehrman in the Boston Globe, The incredible shrinking sound bite.
He points first to old university research that showed how the length of the average soundbite on US television news dropped from 43 seconds in the 1968 presidential election to nine seconds in the 1988 election.
By the last presidential election, the bite had "dropped to a tick under eight seconds." But are politicians and journalists right to lament the trend towards a (supposedly) "shorter, dumber, and shriller political discourse"?
Fehrman cites research (in Journalism Studies by David M. Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier) showing that political soundbites have been getting shorter for more than a century, and it started with newspapers.
By 1916, they found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892.
This does not, however, suggest a loss of seriousness, but "the rise of a more sophisticated and independent style of journalism... Letting politicians ramble doesn't necessarily produce a better or more informative political discourse."
That's only a soundbite, of course. Fehrman's lengthy article merits reading.
