The Good and Bad About Sound Bites

If you’re worried about our political conversation, then, sound bites may be more a symptom than a cause. And they do come with benefits. Hallin has argued all along that television news in the 1960s and 1970s, which many take to be the genre’s golden age, was never actually that good. Stories were dull and disorganized; those long quotations would be followed by a couple of seconds of dead air. Early newspapers, in their time, were no different. The Boston Globe’s first issue, in 1872, devoted much of its front page to transcriptions of church sermons. What Hallin and Ryfe may have been measuring, as much as anything else, were two different forms of media figuring out what worked