New research shows that the political soundbite has been shrinking for more than a century :
A professor at the University of California had just published research showing that the length of the average TV sound bite had dropped dramatically, from 43 seconds in the 1968 presidential election to a mere nine seconds in the 1988 election. And this drop had led to lots of hand-wringing — from professors, from journalists, and from politicians themselves. “If you couldn’t say it in less than 10 seconds,” Michael Dukakis complained about the previous campaign, “it wasn’t heard because it wasn’t aired.”
And so CBS, the network of Murrow and Cronkite, pitched its new extended-sound-bite policy as “an experiment” and “a public service.” It was also a savvy bit of marketing, as the network’s first segment, which centered on a 34-second clip of Perot, earned plenty of praise.
If you’ve watched any political coverage since 1992, you know what happened: CBS’s experiment failed.
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