Sound Bites

A sound bite is an audio snippet (often a phrase or sentence) excerpted from a longer quotation, speech, or interview. They are most often heard from political figures but can be used for anyone of interest to the media. By definition, a sound bite lacks context, save what a program announcer, anchor, or host provides. Insertion of sound bites into news broadcasts, while a valuable way of adding variety and reality, is also susceptible to manipulation and requires ethical decision making on the part of news media. Politicians and others in public life quickly learn to produce on-demand sound bites during media interviews as they make it more likely their words will be used on the air.

Most often a short phrase or sentence, a sound bite captures the essence of what the speaker is saying. Such moments stay in the listener's memory and serve as a sample of the larger message. Put another way, the best ones hit home. They may be off-the-cuff remarks or carefully preplanned. Broadcast and cable make heavy use of sound bites and they are increasingly evident on the Internet as well. And they can have negative repercussions for unwary political candidates or show business figures where a momentary comment can haunt a speaker. Senator George Allen (R-VA) learned this in 2006 when an offhanded racist comment became a widely distributed sound bite which helped cost him re-election.

The abbreviating trend in political candidate sound bite use shows up clearly in network evening newscast statistics. In covering presidential elections, 1968 newscasts used campaign speech sound bites averaging 43 seconds in length (easily a paragraph and often longer); by the 1972 race, that figure had dropped sharply to 25 seconds; it declined further to less than 10 seconds by 1984; and under 8 seconds (a short sentence or phrase) by 1992. It [Page 1300]has stayed about the same in elections since. The process of using tinier sound bites contributed to personality-based coverage that stressed the “horse race” aspect of campaigns, as it was extremely difficult to say much of substance about issues in such brief snippets. On the other hand, by the early 2000s, broadcast networks often provided longer excerpts on their affiliated cable channels or posted them online.

Political sound bites are but one part of a larger trend—the ever shorter story on most television newscasts. Audiences were presumed to have short attention spans, and thus stories needed to be “punched up” with visual and sound reality material while still being kept very short. By the early 2000s, a news story of three minutes would be unusual on the television network evening newscasts. In this sense, the use of sound bites merely parallels other trends to brevity in television (including more widespread use of short commercials—ten seconds or even shorter—to squeeze more in and cut the costs of each individual spot). Television news stories are getting shorter, the number of different visual elements (and sometimes sound bites) has increased, and the result is a faster-paced news program.

Two older examples of the staying power of a sound bite demonstrate the value of using the right words at the right time and place. In a speech delivered by then–Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minnow early in 1961—otherwise forgotten today—he described commercial television as “a vast wasteland” and the term stuck. Likewise a political speech of some complexity can be reduced to a handful of words—the term iron curtain was not original to Winston Churchill, but when he used it deftly in a March 1946 speech, it soon became a description of the cold war divide in Europe.

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