Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 15, 1990 TAG: 9007160181
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Bits, in computerland, are the smallest piece of information: O or 1, yes or no? Put all those bits together, and what do you get? Sound bites.
That's not all you get. You get a whole new set of ethical problems. Some of us even get the Sound Bite Blues.
Take the latest national show-stopper, the proposed 27th Constitutional Amendment, forbidding flag burning. What seemed to worry many in Congress who thought it right to vote against it? Their opponents would use their negative vote in a sound bite, come election time.
Think of it: a group of punks burning (maybe spitting on) Old Glory, and voice-over saying: "Would you vote for a candidate who hates your flag, and voted to burn it?" Might he or she also hate Mom and apple pie? Think about it . . . .
Fast foods are junk for the stomach; sound bites, junk for the mind. If you make the nightly news, you generally get nine seconds; if you have big bucks, and can zap your opponent with a TV commercial, you get 30 seconds. Is that any way to run a democracy?
Republican pushers and prompters seem to be the bite masters. Look how Reagan "bit into" Carter, Bush into Dukakis. Read my lips: It worked.
But Republicans knew as much 40 years ago, in the Age of Eisenhower the Conqueror. Do you remember "I Like Ike," and the black-and-white TV spots that carried him into the White House?
Having conquered Europe, he had no trouble zapping the Democrats. His balding talking-head answered canned questions asked by people he never saw, with snappy words he never wrote.
Industry observed and imitated. "Where's the beef?" thundered aging Clara Pell - and cattle trembled all the way to Wyoming. Walter Mondale used Clara's three words to wipe out Gary Hart.
We watch the "Great Debates" at election time not to understand the complex issues but to memorize the latest sound bite. Everyone recalls that hapless Dan Quayle compared himself to Jack Kennedy, and Lloyd Bentsen delivered the bite: "You're no Jack Kennedy."
Quayle was sent to the foot of the class - where he remains to this very day.
We are a nation of stand-up comedians and one-liners, and these little touches of entertainment on the political scene don't bother us. Maybe they should. Each is like a single snowflake, which seems so insignificant when it is falling. But we wake up next morning and we are snowbound.
Have media hypes and sound bites become loose cannons on democracy's deck? Will we be governed by talking heads, and not thinking humans? Does the ethical rot we see and lament in televangelism, insider trading, S&L scandals and HUD rip-offs relate in some way to our sound-bite society? Are we dealing not just with politics but with ethics?
Nor is the question exclusively American. London's PR whiz-kids of, Sattchi and Sattchi, had much to do with Margaret Thatcher's unprecedented victories in Britain. By identifying Francois Mitterand with the "Force Tranquille" (Quiet Force) and idyllic small French villages, Jacques Seguela has kept him firmly in office. And look how the Marlboro Man keeps selling cigarettes.
Hamlet thought his world "out of joint." Might ours be, too?
Software can't keep up with hardware; broadcasting ends up narrowcasting; hype wipes out hope; music stops singing and goes bump in the night. Instead of FDR, we have PR - anonymous people who manipulate our leaders like puppets. The dummy board has escaped from the TV studio and set up shop in Congress. By their sound bites ye shall know them.
As if misinformation isn't bad enough, now we must cope with disinformation.
In 1986, the Reagan administration launched a disinformation campaign to scare Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafy.
A story was planted in the Aug. 25, 1986, Wall Street Journal saying we were preparing to strike Libya. When White House spokesman Larry Speaks called the story "authoritative," the game was afoot. When State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb uncovered the trick, he resigned, saying: "Faith in the word of America is the pulsebeat of our democracy."
Those words were not a sound bite. Kalb was quickly replaced, and Reagan left office with the highest public approval of any recent president.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, Edmund Burke once pointed out, is for good men and women to do nothing.
But what do you do about a sound bite? You absorb it. After all, it's entertaining - like sit-coms, the nightly news, late-night shows, TV religion and comic strips.
Are we (as Neil Postman suggests) Entertaining Ourselves to Death? That thought gives me the Sound Bite Blues.
With the real blues - from Beale Street and Memphis - dearer to me than MTV, I might even write a song myself, beginning:
"Elections are comin'
We're all gonna lose:
I got those Sound Bite Blues!"
by CNB