by Dane Salmon

A new specter now looms over American politics. It’s not extremism, a foreign country nor anything the left or right alone is guilty of, but something far more menacing: soundbite politics.

The reduction of political discourse into 10-second long, surface-level remarks without context is on a course to worsen the already miserable state of political debate in the United States.

Take the most recent Democratic primary debate, for example. If you watched it, you would probably realize it was the exact same as the last two or three: the same points were made by the same politicians about the same things.

The only difference was their delivery. They spew intentionally fallacious arguments that are segmented then disseminated on Twitter for certain verified accounts to beat like a dead horse. Sound good to you? I agree — the practice is positively vile.

If it’s not noticeable enough, the influence of bias within mass media upon political discourse has come to a head. MSNBC and Vox show only what its readership wants to see, and the same goes for Fox News and Breitbart.

Anything remotely appealing Donald Trump says in a press conference can be edited, placed in the appropriate context and used to sway the media outlet’s readership or viewership towards its chosen ends. 

An interesting case of this is the amount of time mass media already spend discussing President Trump’s tweets. News anchors and talk show hosts across the political spectrum regularly spend minutes dissecting Trump’s tweets, which are already unsubstantive from the get-go.

What purpose could this possibly serve besides political polarization and division? If you watch CNN, Don Lemon tells you how to think, and if you watch Fox News Bret Baier does the thinking for you. 

Televised media, however, is hardly the only culprit. Newspapers, online publications and podcast hosts do the exact same.

Breitbart can publish an entire article about yesterday’s Trump tweet extolling President Trump’s virtues for typing a bite-sized quote on something Republicans like, and Vox can do essentially the same by over-analyzing every period and comma of Trump’s few sentences, and the end result is perhaps even more destructive than television’s treatment.

A pointless doctoral-level literary analysis of insubstantial political drivel is published by a myriad of authors from countless political views nearly every day on the subject. What do these Ph.D. theses on Trump’s tweets, good or bad, accomplish?

They accomplish exactly what sound-bite politics is designed to do: appeal to its audience and demonize the other.

It’s in every American’s interest to combat this foe. Political gridlock grips our halls of government, and ideological hatred plagues our culture.

A concerted effort to not be swayed by soundbite politics is not a cure-all for our sickness, but it’s sure to help. The whirlpool of soundbite politics is difficult to escape — wherever we turn, we face the exact things I have described, but the whole story is always out there.

I implore you to do yourself — and the country — the favor of fighting against the transmutation of political discourse into something which could barely be called by the same name.

The point of no return is near at hand. 

Dane Salmon, FCRH ’21, is a philosophy major from Coppell, Texas.