Today is primary day in New Hampshire. As Hillary Clinton takes on Barack Obama and John McCain challenges Mitt Romney. I look back on my first political campaign in 1988. I was part of the advance team for former Congressman Dick Gephardt who was running for President. We won in Iowa and South Dakota, lost in New Hampshire and never recovered.
Our job was to stage telegenic events replete with large crowds. In the pre-Internet days the goal was to stage a great visual and help deliver the sound bite - that brief excerpt from a press event with the message of the day - to the local and national news outlets.
A point of focus for the campaign, the sound bite represented to many media critics and pundits everything that was wrong with politics. Sound bites disrespected the voters' intelligence. They denied voters a chance to really understand a candidate's position. They cheapened politic discourse by reducing complex issues to a few choice words.
Throughout the 1988 campaign, a source of considerable discussion was the shrinking length of the sound bite over the years. Consider the following written last year:
In the 1968 presidential race between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the candidates' sound bites on network news averaged 43 seconds; by the 1988 race between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, the average was down to nine. An October 2004 study by the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin of 2,166 hours of network affiliate newscasts concluded that sound bites for presidential candidates were up a bit, averaging 10.3 seconds, but more than two-thirds of all campaign stories contained no candidate sound bites at all!
Fast forward to 2008. Sound bites are still an important part of a communications strategy along with stump speeches and political commercials; but consumers now have so many more sources for news and information about the candidates and the campaign. Concerns about the length of the soundbite seem anachronistic.
From the candidates' homepages to YouTube, the full text of a speech or the latest commercial is often a click away. Voters can not only get news more easily, they can make it themselves with access to a blog, video camera and an Internet connection. Look no further than George Allen's 2006 Senatorial bid if you have any doubts about the changing nature of information dissemination.
Technology has the power to transform. But in eliminating some concerns, it creates others. The Internet enables us to access information sources we support and ignore those we oppose. It makes it easier for rumors to spread and survive.
Fractured and divided, the new media landscape promotes a multiplicity of viewpoints at the expense of a national consensus. CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and the New York Times no longer carry the same power to persuade. Swimming in a sea of information, we must work harder at separating opinion from fact and truth from rumor. The "user," not the viewer, listener, or reader, is the unit of measurement, and he or she plays a bigger role in shifting through all the "content."
Ironically, 20 years ago, we were lamenting the state of political discourse and the amount of candidate airtime; today we are overwhelmed with so much content as to potentially numb the electorate rather than deprive it.
Let me get back to you.
Technorati Tags: New Hampshire Primary; 2008 Presidential Campaign; Sound Bite; Hillary Clinton; Barack Obama; John McCain; Mitt Romney; Dick Gephardt;
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