SOUND BITES ... ZINGERS ...
BUZZ WORDS ... IMAGERY ...
HYPE ... NOISE

We all know how these define the texture and culture of the modern electronic media. And we also know why our media climate resembles a dust storm on a barren plain: the bottom line of audience share. The impatience of the camera and the microphone, their need to gobble up one image or phrase and move on to the next. No depth or context; no background; no past, no future; no sometimes, no maybe, no why. But what does such a media environment really mean--how does it shape the values and ideals that underlie our political life? That is the question The Sound Bite Society sets out to answer. And the answer it comes up with is original and controversial.

Critics on the right claim that the media are liberal; but those same conservatives are using electronic media with great success. The Sound Bite Society argues that television is ideally suited to flickering sound bites and simple, visceral messages and images; television relentlessly simplifies, and simplicity is the core principle of conservatism. TV likewise punishes complex ideas and messages, which are the core of liberalism. Television is thus a handmaiden of conservative ideals and an obstacle to progressive ones.

The argument of The Sound Bite Society is mapped, and set in a broader context, in the Introduction. Chapter One examines the rise of the "Electronic Right," and challenges the familiar claim of the media's liberalism on a wide variety of fronts. Chapter Two analyzes the distinctive communicative language of television and its simplifying tendencies; Chapter Three considers the forms of simplification (including intrinsically complex forms) implicit in TV's overall picture of reality and effects on consciousness. In Chapter Four, the concept of complexity is explored along with its political implications. Finally, Chapter Five looks at how the rhetoric of the "Electronic Right" simplifies and distorts political discourse, how it contrasts to critical thinking and critical media literacy, and how the left might respond. In the concept of complexity, The Sound Bite Society offers an entirely new rubric for understanding the nexus of television and politics.

The Sound Bite Society: Television and The American Mind (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999)

This is the most searching book I have seen on television’s assault on our individual psyches and our society. Scheuer emerges as not only a first-rank scholar of the media but a philosopher of the media.

Daniel Schorr
Senior Analyst, National Public Radio

This brilliant and unique book explores the implications of television's inherent propensity to simplify complex ideas. I highly recommend The Sound Bite Society to all students and critics of television, both academic and otherwise, and to anyone concerned with politics and the future of American democracy.

Marie Winn
author, The Plug-In Drug

This is a thoughtful, in many ways amazing book. I thought it was impossible to say anything new about how to think about television until I read Jeffrey Scheuer’s provocative meditation. Part polemic, part brief for an intriguing thesis about media and the left (that I’m not sure I buy) and part rainbow of dazzling insights, no student of the media can afford not to read this book and no serious watcher of television will want to miss it.

Victor Navasky
Publisher and Editorial Director, The Nation

The Sound Bite Society is a beautifully written and powerfully argued account of our televisual culture. Politics is the central focus of this account; Scheuer asks what the culture of television means for democratic political life. His response is social criticism of the best kind--genuinely enlightening about the structure and language of contemporary television, deeply engaged with, and persuasively unhappy about, its concrete reality and moral/intellectual effects.

Michael Walzer
Professor of Social Science
Institute for Advanced Study