Yesterday, Matt Compton raised an interesting point about voters’ ability to bypass the media “filter” and avoid the ills of modern soundbite journalism. Compton used Barack Obama’s speech on race in America on Tuesday as a key example.
If you do a quick survey online (and ignore The Corner) the criticism, such as it is, boils down to one simple thing — the speech was too long. It offered too many opportunities for negative soundbites…. But that only remains true if the one way that people hear the words of Obama’s speech is in a 20-second clip. The thus-far remarkable thing about this election is that it no longer has to be that way.
The campaign put the video of the entire speech on YouTube before lunch. Twenty-four hours after Obama walked off the stage in Philadelphia, this 37-minute address has already been viewed more than 1,000,000 times. As I write this post, 20 additional people are watching the speech, it’s currently the “most-viewed video” at YouTube. I’d bet my lunch that another 1,000,000 people will watch this speech before the week is out.
The New York Times posted a transcript of the speech in full online, and by 3:00, it was among most popular stories on the website. Formatted for the web, Obama’s remarks spill over seven pages, but the article has already been emailed and shared by thousands of NYT readers.
On the YouTube point, Compton’s lunch is safe — as of a few minutes ago, the clip was well past 2 million views, and that’s with heavy competition with identical clips (which adds hundreds of thousands of views to the total).
To be sure, regardless of one’s feelings about Obama and/or the speech itself, this seems like a positive development. Americans didn’t need a cable network to show a truncated, edited soundbite from Obama’s address, or some talking head to tell them whether the speech was good or bad, effective or ineffective. They could just watch the whole thing on their own, and come to their own conclusions.
Compton concludes, “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.”
I really want to believe that’s right, but I have my doubts.
The YouTube views are hard to dismiss, of course. In an unusual twist, more people saw CNN’s presentation of the speech on YouTube than on CNN.
But who’s tuning in? 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.
Compton noted that we’re at the point in which millions of people can experience political events “outside the mainstream media.” That’s absolutely true, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s an undoubtedly a positive development. But how many are taking advantage of the opportunity? The traditional media filters are “no doubt becoming less important,” but if we’re ranking sources for information, they’re still way out in front.
Some of this is generational, and will change in time. But as far as I can tell, the soundbite is hanging in there, and isn’t planning to go away anytime soon.