Fred Truman
Design & Code Creative
Open Video and the Political Sound Bite
April 28, 2011
It is clear that the wider adoption of open video standards will have an impact on how we view and interpret the opinions of political candidates, and one can imagine both benefits as well as drawbacks to this adoption. If we assume that purely objective reporting was impossible in our network TV news past and homophily and the present online echo chamber gives us access to an increasingly marginalized view, I wonder whether an increased ability to subjectively contextualize video will prove boon or bane to our political process.
At least a portion of the project I am working on deals with taking a speaker’s words and shuffling them to create new phrases and opinions. I’ve gotten to a point where I need to think about how I recontextualize the speaker’s words. For my purposes it’s obvious that a tone of absurdity will serve best, but what if my motivations were political and meant to serve more devious intents? Would it be possible to create a presentation that effectively convinced an eager audience that the speaker held opinions that they in fact did not have?
We see this a lot nowadays, and the formula is really as simple as having a couple of people in a newsroom having an impassioned discussion centered on very specific ideas and then showing a short piece of a larger video that takes the speaker’s words completely out of context. This technique builds a very weak argument for the attentive and moderate among us but resonates strongly for the politically indignant. Building from this idea, one can imagine the way in which our ability to dynamically and powerfully manipulate video on fly could increase the divide between left and right.
I found a pretty hysterical incident in which Obama, when giving his speech at West Point last May, announced that America would be ending combat missions in Iraq. After his statement the audience of cadets applaud (albeit lightly), however FOX News’ online version (embedded here) of the same speech omits the applause. They claimed it was a technical error, where the editor merged two clips and the muted buffer just happened to align perfectly with this moment, while others think it was an intentional blunder. You can check out more details on the Huffington Post.
Not to mention length of reporting shrinking alongside our attention spans. NPR has a short little piece describing how the political sound bite has shrunk over time, from an average of 43 seconds in 1968 down to 9 seconds in 1988, and despite an effort by CBS to restrict lengths to no less than 30 seconds during the 1992 campaign coverage – this is where it remains. Despite length being a decent indicator of adequate context, in his Boston Globe piece Craig Fehrman offers some evidence that a shrinking sound bite may not be a bad thing, and The Onion (as always) does a really nice job getting a laugh out of the 24 second news cycle.
Whatever the case may be, there seems to be two opposing forces which seem to be at work when we consider the impact open video has on our opinions of political candidates: increased access and increased decontextualization – and I’m still not sure which side will have a greater impact.