Anyone who buys the beltway complaint that television news reporting shrivels both politics and public discourse has two new reasons to worry: sound bites are getting shorter and video reels are getting longer. That means less talk of policy solutions and more rolling shots of diplomatic handshakes, tarmac striding, and presidential cowboys whacking underbrush on Texas ranches. In the Journal of Communication’s winter issue, Indiana University professors Erik Bucy and Maria Grabe update a landmark 1992 study, which found that clips of presidential candidates speaking between 1968 and 1992 had dramatically shrunk from an average of one minute to under ten seconds each. Since 1992, say Bucy and Grabe, sound bites have been further compressed into eight-second nibbles. Meanwhile, B-roll of candidates has expanded, and image bites (no words from the candidates) now take up more airtime than sound bites in campaign coverage.

But do the details of the findings offer any hope? Are sound bites, though shorter, more numerous? Nope. Denser with policy content? Afraid not. Shrinking in proportion to the length of news stories? On the contrary. Since 1992, the number of sound bites has hovered at a bit over two per story. Only a third of sound bites address substantive issues or breaking news; and in the average two-minute campaign story, candidates speak for less than twenty seconds.

There is some good news, however—in pictures, not words; “image bites” rather than sound bites. Sampling ABC, NBC, and CBS campaign coverage from 1992 to 2004, Bucy and Grabe find that close-ups and action shots of candidates, such as Bill Clinton playing the sax or John Kerry windsurfing, “convey important cues about status, viability, and physical and mental fitness for office.” “Because pictures are perceived as firsthand knowledge,” they say, “…visuals are undoubtedly delivering more information to viewers...

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