Will soundbite politics win out over soundblast politics? That’s the question that was on my mind as I flew out to Los Angeles yesterday evening to do a couple of talks today and tomorrow at the USC Annenberg School and at the Economics of Social Media conference.
As we crossed over the center of the country, I watched Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech before the Detroit NAACP as it was played live on CNN and thought to myself, “Well, there wasn’t that much that was controversial about his speech, it was mainly a paean to diversity and respecting each other’s differences.” But as soon as Wright’s long speech ended, I could see the soundbite machine gearing up on CNN, as the anchor struggled to boil it down into a form that would be digestible in the current campaign narrative.
And that’s what appears to be happening today as Wright continues to bask in his 15 minutes of national fame, with a morning appearance at the National Press Club that a friend of mine described as a “media circus.”
It’s really ironic that Wright would choose to feed the media beast with flamboyant statements after doing a lengthy interview with PBS’s Bill Moyers Friday night where he explicitly bemoaned how other people were taking his words and soundbiting them out of context to distort his meaning.
But here’s the thing: Our 24/7 news media loves the instant hit and the quick reaction far far more than the substantive conversation. Those video clips of Wright on Moyers have gotten maybe 40,000 views each, while the much hotter snippets of Wright saying things like “God damn America” are getting a magnitude more attention.
I have made the argument (here and here) that the online reaction to Obama’s detailed, thoughtful and personally honest speech about race offered some hope that perhaps the “soundblast” (i.e. rich content) was beginning to overcome the soundbite (hot-button distortion) in politics. But at the moment, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Below is a TubeMogul chart showing the daily track of views of Obama’s 37-minute speech on race; as you can see it seems to have run its course.
Of course, anything can happen in politics and probably will if it hasn’t already in this rollercoaster of a presidential election. But if I was scoring things right now, I’d have to give the edge back to the soundbiters.
April 28, 2008