What Sound Bites Are Reported During the Presidential Campaign and Why

The use of sound bites through the careful selection of details is one of the ways the media presents the views of presidential candidates. The sound bite began during radio days, long before television changed the ways received their information. In radio, a sound bite was a tape of someone speaking other than the news commentator. It was radio's way of allowing the newsmaker to speak. Then sound bites ran for minutes and could be as long as paragraphs. Today, the sound bite is short, and getting shorter every year. In 1968 a typical sound bite from a presidential election was more than forty seconds. In 1996 the sound bite had shriveled to less than ten seconds. Instead of paragraphs, the sound bite is now a single sentence or even a phrase. Sound bites reduce complex ideas into catchy phrases. That's where the bias begins. When people hear or read a sound bite, they aren't hearing or reading the entire message and so the original meaning may be lost or misinterpreted. Because sound bites are repeated out of context, they slant reality. During the 1988 presidential election, the sound bite was around 10 seconds long. The Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University's study of the presidential primaries in 2004 found that one month before the election, the candidates' sound bites dropped to an average of 7.8 seconds.

During the 1996 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic National Convention, discussing his vision for the future. He talked about education, technology, and the welfare of American citizens. The news media extracted a catchy phrase from his speech: ''A bridge to the twenty-first century." News commentators and reporters and Clinton himself repeated the phrase over and over. It became the sound bite of Clinton's reelection campaign.