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To much of the media criticism from this cycle has gotten caught up in partisanship and questions of candidates. Given that most every example of bad reporting will include someone in particular being treated unfairly, it's hard to step out of that trap. But if you're looking at averages over a period of decades, the picture clarifies considerably:
In the Journal of Communication’s winter issue, Indiana University professors Erik Bucy and Maria Grabe update a landmark 1992 study, which found that clips of presidential candidates speaking between 1968 and 1992 had dramatically shrunk from an average of one minute to under ten seconds each. Since 1992, say Bucy and Grabe, sound bites have been further compressed into eight-second nibbles. Meanwhile, B-roll of candidates has expanded, and image bites (no words from the candidates) now take up more airtime than sound bites in campaign coverage.But do the details of the findings offer any hope? Are sound bites, though shorter, more numerous? Nope. Denser with policy content? Afraid not. Shrinking in proportion to the length of news stories? On the contrary. Since 1992, the number of sound bites has hovered at a bit over two per story. Only a third of sound bites address substantive issues or breaking news; and in the average two-minute campaign story, candidates speak for less than twenty seconds.And think for a second about what those "substantive" clips must be like. How much substantive policy discussion do you think you could convey in eight seconds? I just timed myself reading that last sentence aloud. I used up five of my eight seconds.You might expect candidate clips to shrink if the media had less time. But the opposite is true. There are far more hours devoted to broadcast news today than in 1992, or 1968. Yet candidate clips are still shorter. Which leads to at least one clear conclusion: If candidates are spending less time speaking to viewers directly, but there are more hours to fill up, that means candidates are ever more filtered through the words and commentary of pundits, commentators, and reporters. We get less of the subject and more of the mediator. Thinking for a moment about who those mediators are, does anyone want to argue that this is healthy?
