Steve has a good post up on The Carpetbagger Report about how rumors of the death of sound-bite journalism are greatly exaggerated. In the post, Steve takes political blogger Matt Compton to task over his recent post about Barack Obama's amazing speech on race relations in America on Tuesday. In it, Compton argues that the number of YouTube views of Obama's complete speech (2.5 million already) and the popularity of the speech's text at the NYTimes indicate a general rejection of sound-bite-driven pieces (like MSNBC's take, which simply read, "Obama: Racial anger is 'real'"). Compton writes...I'm sure millions of people watched clips from Obama's remarks on the network evening news. But millions more are experiencing the speech outside the mainstream media. They're reading, watching, and listening to this speech in full, then discussing it and sharing it. The evening news is still important, and the cable shows still matter. But the filters are no doubt becoming less important, and that in turn means that the soundbite might lose some of its stranglehold on political communications.
Steve counters that while Compton's observations about the numbers of full-text viewers and readers are correct and worth noting, what may be more important are which viewers are getting the sound bites and which are getting the whole speech...
The typical American voter isn’t going to watch a political speech on CNN, online, or anywhere else. They’ll probably hear that Obama has a “crazed” preacher who “hates America,” think less of Obama as a result, and move on. If they defy the odds and decide they’re interested in learning more, they’ll turn on the TV and — you guessed it — hear the truncated, edited soundbites.
Put it this way: are the kind of voters Obama wants to reassure — older, white, working class Americans in a state like Pennsylvania — flocking to YouTube to listen to a senator give a 40-minute speech on race relations in America? I don’t know, but I suspect not.
Even though it's true that the majority of people who really need to hear this whole speech will only know about it through the filter of the 24-hour news networks (if that), Compton's point is still an important one. The writing is on the wall. One of the key differences between the demographics is a simple understanding of what the 'net has to offer. Young people (dare I say "digital natives?") are the ones who are getting to hear this whole speech -- not because they're the only ones with access to YouTube, but because they know that's what YouTube is for.
Have you ever been in a situation where a question about the definition or derivation of a word comes up in a group of people and some of them go digging for a dictionary and others reach for their laptops and cell phones? It's not that the dictionary-grabbers don't have computers and cell phones, it's that their brains don't automatically go there. Young people take the technology for granted. Of course Obama's speech can be seen on YouTube. That's what YouTube does.
Most 24-hour news network consumers probably wouldn't ever think to look online for primary source material. Why would they? That's not what computers are for, computers are for doing your taxes and email.
As "digital natives" become leaders in American culture, this divide will greatly diminish, and then, just maybe, Compton's optimism will be justified and the stranglehold of sound-bite journalism on our nation's collective intelligence will diminish as well.