by Greg Holmquist
University Daily Kansan
U-Wire
Sound bites are truly American. Only in America could debates take, as their starting point, quotes that are all too often out of context, and downright misleading.
One fan of the sound bite that everyone should know is the Fox News Channel.
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Fox swaggers through the cable news channel lineup draped in the American flag capitalizing on the sound bite's massive potential.
As a number of political columnists have recently reported, Brit Hume played on Sept. 24 a clip of Al Gore recently indicating that during the Gulf War he "felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield."
This was contrasted against comments he made as a Senator in 1991 when "[t]here was throughout the war a clear consensus that the United States should not include the conquest of Iraq among its objectives."
Interestingly enough, two days later on Hannity and Colmes, another Fox News program, the entire Gore quote was given. The revised version read that Gore "felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield, even as Saddam began to renew his persecution of the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, groups that we had, after all, encouraged to rise up against Saddam."
The more extensive quotation reveals Gore's comments as a criticism of the senior Bush's decision to abandon Kurds and Shiites, not a criticism of his decision to leave Saddam in power.
Fox's problems seem more like the mistakes of an understaffed and desperate high school newspaper than those of a 24-hour news channel, but then again, who is to blame when sound bites rule the day? The phenomenon unfortunately permeates, to varying degrees, every aspect of the media in America.
The University Daily Kansan is no exception. It can range from resentment over labeling Sept. 11 "demonstrators" as "protestors," to grumblings about misquotations. Either way no one is immune.
Sound bites do make for good entertainment.
For comedy, turn to George W. Bush or former Vice President Dan Quayle. And who can forget clips of former President Clinton asking for a definition of the word "is," or denying having had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Despite their entertainment value, complacency is the wrong response.
It is inevitable that in the absence of the complete story someone will fill in the details.
Bias is aggravated by myopia and sound bites have a tendency to focus on the immediate details more than the big picture. They suffer from a predisposition to hyperbole and walk through political minefields with blinders on all sides.
It makes for fascinating politics but at the expense of actual progress.
So next time you hear a sound bite, get your entertainment out of it, but remember to take those short blurbs of speech with a grain of salt.
