SCHEUER, Jeffrey (1999) The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 230 pp. ISBN 1-56858-141-6. Hard cover.
Reviewed by Roger Patching, Queensland University of Technology
The central theme of the book – that American television is tailor-made for the simple ‘sound bite’ messages of the right and gives little coverage to liberals because their messages are more complex and don’t fit neatly into the formula – is hard to accept.
Scheuer also accuses TV of being responsible for the rise of the conservative right in US society.
That’s not to say that the author, who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune doesn’t present a powerful and interesting argument. It’s just that reading at it from the other side of the Pacific, it’s a bit hard to cop.
Scheuer paints a fascinating picture of the impact of television on American society, but in this writer’s opinion draws conclusions too big to be justified by his evidence.
You also can’t help wondering why he and his colleagues at newspapers and magazines around the States are beavering away on their laptops if Larry King and Ted Koppel are the only notable information gatekeepers for the American people.
Put in a local context, if Laurie Oakes (veteran Australian political journalist) is the only one the public takes any notice of across Australia, what’s the point to his weekly column in The Bulletin?
While Channel 9 (Australian commercial network) consistently tells us that ‘more people get their news from Channel 9 that any other source’ surely they’re not suggesting they are the only source?
Scheuer canvasses all the traditional arguments against TV – how it manipulates the emotions, is a simplifier of the complex, numbs its audiences with social stereotypes and saturates them with the trivial and the superficial etc. But he also comes up with some wonderful lines, at one stage calling TV ‘a whore for profit’ and accusing it of being the ‘main culprit’ for creating a society that is ‘dominated by money and profit, imagery and spin, hype and personality’.
|
