![]() FRANK LUNTZ (Republican Pollster): Instead of drilling for oil, exploring for energy. Politicians have adapted by choosing a few words that convey the strongest possible meanings in nine seconds or less. Not long ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion mocked the 24-second news cycle. INSKEEP: And today soundbites remain very short. ![]() There were so many things that would have to change for 30 second soundbites to work that the experiment quickly failed. This actually led to less of the candidates talking on the air and more paraphrase from journalists. FEHRMAN: What they quickly found was that they had to keep throwing out soundbites that simply weren't long enough. But many candidates had learned to keep their thoughts very, very short, as CBS soon realized. MONTAGNE: That's Bill Clinton speaking during that 1992 campaign. President BILL CLINTON: Al Gore is a leading expert in foreign policy, national security and arms control. That was going to be that no soundbite, no matter how pithy or profound it was, was going to run unless it lasted at least 30 seconds. FEHRMAN: CBS decided that they were going to unveil a new policy for their coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. MONTAGNE: Craig Fehrman reviewed the history of the shrinking soundbite in the Boston Globe this week. CRAIG FEHRMAN (Boston Globe): What he discovered was that the length of political soundbites shrank from 43 seconds in 1968 all the way down to nine seconds in 1988. MONTAGNE: It's been this way since at least 1992, when a University of California professor found that TV networks were broadcasting fewer politicians' words. INSKEEP: That took a little under nine seconds, which means it's the average length of a soundbite in broadcast news stories. Representative DARRELL ISSA (Republican, California): The sooner the administration figures out that the enemy is the bureaucracy and the wasteful spending, not the other party, the better off we'll be. (Soundbite of TV show, "Fox News Sunday") Set aside for a moment the substance of what you're about to hear the congressman saying and consider how long it takes him to say it. As Congressman Darrell Issa prepared to take over a powerful House committee, he delivered a message on Fox News Sunday.
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