A quarter-century ago, I wrote a book titled The Sound Bite Society in which I argued that electronic media (at the time, mainly television and radio) are systemically biased to the right. Not intentionally or maliciously biased, but structurally biased. Not “systematically” biased, according to some rule or law, but systemically biased. The argument was – and remains – that by radically atomizing and simplifying information, these media are naturally conducive to the values and messages of the right and inconducive to the more complex, holistic, and egalitarian messages and values of the left.
It all began with a triggering comment by the TV journalist Bruce Morton I heard on CBS News: that in the 1988 presidential campaign, Gov. Michael Dukakis’s messages “didn’t soundbite well.” My book was an attempt to explain what underlay that comment – and that it involved far more than what the astute Mr. Morton intended to say.
I still think I’m basically right. The core axis of differentiation that creates the ideological spectrum is between relative inequality and equality; and a spectrum of simple-to-complex underlies and aligns with that one. Atomization privileges simplicity, which is partitional, over complexity, which is relational.
That’s not to say I’m smug about it. After the book came out in 1999, my own uncertainties about my theory’s strengths and shortcomings were perversely satisfying. It was almost as if I didn’t want to resolve the questions I was pursuing. I just liked pursuing them. The adjective that recurred time and again in reviews of the book wasn’t good or bad, great or awful, but “provocative.” (It even earned one provakativa in Swedish.) That gave my inner provacateur some satisfaction.
I still have trouble some aspects of the argument: for example, explaining why certain rare progressive politicians excel with soundbites. The one who always comes to mind first is Jesse Jackson, whose political poetry was unexcelled, even by the more measured rhetoric of Barack Obama. All I can say is that Jackson’s slogans brilliantly encapsulated a more complex worldview (as bumper stickers can sometimes do). (My own, proudly affixed to the tailgate of my truck, reads: “Lock Him Up.”) Neither does my theory explain the rise, along with Fox News, of left-dominated cable programs such as those on MSNBC.
Nevertheless, it’s much harder for most progressives to speak in the clipped and metaphorical language of electronic media without slipping into polemics and stereotypes and other rhetorical quicksand. One aspect of this phenomenon is arguably not ideological, or a precursor to ideology: the sheer entertainment value of messages and messengers with simpler, more emotional, more exclusionary content, which is then platformed by mainstream media, in conjunction with their misguided disdain for “talking heads.”
As Daniel Trilling notes in a review of Richard Seymore’s book Disaster Nationalism in the London Review of Books online, “…rightwing populism [in the UK] was buoyed by a combination of sympathetic coverage from traditional right-wing press and the increasing prominence of far-right influencers in the mainstream media – only five people have appeared more often on the BBC’s Question Time than [rightwing populist leader Nigel] Farage…”
Closer to home, Ezra Klein, in a recent podcast interview with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, hit my protruding, 25-year-old nail right on the head:
EZRA KLEIN: [O]ne of the ways I view politics is that the communication mediums upon which it happens are very, very determinative in what then becomes powerful and popular and energetic. And I think that the move to social media and algorithmic media, it was really a move towards a style of political communication that is somewhat hostile to the liberal project. The deliberative, open-minded, thoughtful, on the one hand, on the other hand, mode of discourse that Obama's good at. He's bad at Twitter. You ever read Obama on Twitter?
DAVID REMNICK: It's bad. Yeah. No, it's dull.
EZRA KLEIN: It's not his thing. Yeah.
DAVID REMNICK: Trump is good at Twitter.
Over the past decade, at least a half-dozen friends have suggested that my views on electronic media and ideology have been vindicated, and that I should update the book for the age of social media – which was still ten years away when it originally appeared. My answer is always the same: thanks, but I’m no longer up to the job. It’s someone else’s turn – someone like Ezra Klein – to go out on a bold, provocative, well considered, over-researched, years-in-the-making theoretical limb, and wait for it to sag. I’d welcome that; but I’ve moved on to other limbs that, like The Sound Bite Society, sag but do not break.