abstracted from an article by Craig Fehrman at Boston.com
By 1992 the length of the average TV sound bite had dropped to a mere nine seconds. “If you couldn’t say it in less than 10 seconds,” Michael Dukakis complained , “it wasn’t heard because it wasn’t aired.”
David M. Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier, iJournalism Studies , have written that this is not new to TV. By 1916, they found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892.
Craig Fehrman is working on a book about presidents and their books. E-mail [email protected]. 