SOUNDBITE THINKING: THE TEMPTATION TO DISENGAGE
10 March 2003

Does soundbite journalism produce a gap in intellectual exchanges among readers and their peers? Does soundbite reporting promote bias and deception? These are the fundamental ethical questions facing 21st century media outlets. Reporting through catchy puns and shocking headlines is attractive for commercial reasons, but may play a significant role in slowing the spread of accurate information and in fomenting mistrust among readers. Another byproduct of the soundbite method is that reporting from diverse sources begins to converge, and a single interpretation of events emerges, without necessarily being founded in reality, much less in responsible reporting.

If otherwise open societies fall into the pattern of dialogue through the logic of soundbite reckoning, there is a serious peril that much dialogue beyond the media will take on the same shallow level of examination and relevance. The trend of late has been to deliberately use the most inflammatory language possible in framing headlines and spreading soundbites, which gets people interested, but tends to provoke uninformed reactions instead of studied debate. Another side-effect of such reporting is that the process of reporting and the work of the entire editorial staff of a news outlet becomes obsolete to many, who digest the short, expressive headlines and make up their mind accordingly, without reading further.

In the long run, such trends (which may appear to boost sales or viewership) may actually spell defeat for the work of real journalists, leading to a consolidation of information and a serious degradation of the quality and scope of debate in democratic societies. This brings about an intellectual crisis for society at large and a real threat to the concept of a free and independent press.

The crisis lies in the inevitable depletion of intellectual resources (combining information, analysis, dissent and the fruits of individual liberty) available to the average citizen. That scarcity then leads to the hardening of political factions, an unhealthy fixation on the terms of debate, the reduction of civil dialogue among competing populations and the respective authorities they expect to serve their interests, and so the uncivilizing of the overall official structure of the society.

This sounds dramatic, but only because it is like a tide of interest, bias and intolerance, that sweeps across the affected public, a sequence of forces and armaments which no one wants to acknowledge has been allowed into their midst. These forces are known, in the wisdom of open societies, to diminish the democratic vitality of structures devoted to the public interest, to distort the channels of access by which ordinary citizens access the levers of power. This aspect of the intellectual-resource depletion then appears to be incredibly well organized, leading to the claim that those who lament the infiltration of unthought assertions into informed debate are nothing but paranoid or over-imaginative zealots, unnerved by the evolution of social debate.

This accusation is dissolved by the observation of a tidal effect inherent to mass-media that gives this appearance. There is no conspiracy; no small cabal of sinister plotters could guarantee the reining in of thousands of media outlets and individual reporters across a nation. Instead, it is precisely the free choice of so many that invents the trap: the soundbite is easy, it is convenient, a way to profess knowledge without having to secure the roots of knowledge. In the economy of the world in haste, the soundbite is a necessary invention, a work of the imagination, for some a poetic feat.

The soundbite serves a purpose, and so has become a tool constantly used in the exercise of broadcast journalism. It has been adopted by the advertising world, which has sought to exploit the sharp and resonant nature of this approach to language to gain a foothold in the minds of viewers, listeners, readers. It is the resonance of that language that should be called into question. Beyond a mere exploitation of the nature of the brain, that resonance indicates a tendency in public discourse, a kind of comfort with the half-true.

The culprit in the soundbite culture is the public: when people disengage from the affairs of their world, when people ignore the effects of their habits, their lifestyles, their decisions and their general worldview, when people abandon all interest in the work of organizing the community around them, they are left vulnerable to the imposition of standards that might otherwise be unacceptable. In the mass-media environment, this is even more problematic, due to the accelerated pace of dialogue and the exchange of fragmentary utterances that passes for debate. Within hours, thousands of media venues may have fixated on the same few words, providing no pertinent analysis or background, but rather repeating, quoting, abstracting a handful of words, dressing them in a kind of false majesty of implied meaning.

The essential danger of the soundbite is that it may come to be all too satisfying, giving the impression that with nothing more than a headline, one has acquired complete knowledge of an entire landscape of events, issues, concepts and controversies. Whole lifetimes' worth of work are reduced to misleading impressions, derived from language not meant to communicate meaning as such. A clever soundbite can exclude millions of individuals' stories, who may be suffering from something tied to that headline, mired in the context that was left behind by the disinterested.

I write not to chastise, but to alert the reader to the idea that there is a wealth of information in the general environment of the living and the buzzing communicative world. There is as such no reason to believe that what is presented in the slick economy of trimmed phrasing contains, or even seeks to contain, let alone relay, the whole truth. I write to alert the reader to the very human sensibility that language is inherently approximate, and that one must not assume that with a handful of words, however elegant, the rigors of a complex choice can be well defined. The mind always wants more knowledge, where it is clear that there is more to be had; the deception that soundbite thinking brings about is that the world has suddenly resolved itself into a simple, uninteresting gel, easily tamed by the hard-edged disengagement with discovery. [s]