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This chapter documents the extent to which presidential candidates visually appear on the nightly news by drawing on a longitudinal analysis of presidential news coverage from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 general elections. For each year, the political reporting of the main broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) was coded for visual information. It summarizes the frequency and duration of candidate image bites that were broadcast, in which candidates were shown but not heard speaking, and compares them to sound bites in which candidates were simultaneously seen and heard. The chapter also assesses sound bite content — what the candidates are actually saying in these televised actualities — and introduces a typology for classifying the different types of sound and image bites that appear on the news.

As sound bites and talking points from political speeches circulate in the media, they form the basis of an intertextual series. One effect of forwarding an intertextual series is to further solidify the larger narrative with which it is associated. However, while reiteration of prior text may maintain fidelity to a meaning already established, it may also introduce new meanings. Challenge and resistance may occur through meta-pragmatic comments that overtly evaluate prior text or through the simple refraction that takes place anytime prior text is introduced into a new context. This chapter examines these different aspects of recontextualization to illustrate how key phrases associated with the narrative are reshaped through social interaction.

This chapter considers the question of whether daily news over the past century has gone along with the modern trend of shorter news. When the occupation of journalist first emerged in the nineteenth century, realist news was mainly short, and everything in the modern world has seemed to go only faster for more than a century. First radio picked up the pace and then television followed, requiring shorter attention spans. Along came faxes, then electronic mail, and now video messaging. MTV made images move faster, television commercials got shorter, and online ads shrank to a few seconds. Critics call it sound-bite society or McDonaldization, reducing information to nuggets. However, studies show that news has been getting longer, moving away from brief realist descriptions of stand-alone events and aligning with modern impulses toward big-picture explanation. The trend occurred across legacy news media: newspaper reporters writing longer, television reporters speaking more, and even reporters on public radio, the home of extended news, talking more in longer stories.

Chapter 4 turns its attention to the stasis of letter versus spirit. Traditionally, this stasis has been understood as pitting the exact words of a text against the author’s intent, but the chapter expands the notion of spirit to include other animating forces of textual meaning, such as an overarching principle of interpretation brought by readers to the text. The chapter shows how both the letter and spirit of a text can be divided, with arguers disputing the text’s real versus apparent letter or the author’s real versus apparent intent. To demonstrate how arguers construe authorial intention for their own ends, the chapter analyzes the controversy during the 2008 presidential campaign over the “God damn America” sound bite extracted from a sermon preached by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s then-pastor. Critics dismissed Wright’s defense of his intentions, pointing to the sermon’s exact wording as evidence of his, and by extension Obama’s, anti-Americanism.

When I first made the jump from print to broadcast, people kept asking me if I missed writing. The question was funny, but also vexing. I hadn't stopped writing, I was just writing in a different way. And not really all that different, just shorter. But after a time my vexation went away, and I decided the question was a form of flattery. Good radio stories are intimate and personal, where the listener gets a sense of being talked with, not talked at. It's not supposed to sound scripted, or like someone reading from a book. It's supposed to sound like a dinner conversation. Susan Stamberg once described good radio as akin to the guilty pleasure of listening in on a really interesting conversation at the next table in a restaurant. Radio also gives people a chance to use their imaginations. Take the interview I did with Harold Varmus when he took over as director of the National Institutes of Health in 1993.1 wanted to present Varmus as the academic scientist who didn't give a damn about the norms of Washington bureaucracy. So I interviewed him on his way to work, not in the government car that most agency heads used, but the way he always commuted: on his bicycle. You didn't have to see Varmus pedaling through traffic; all you needed for the mental picture was the up-close sound of traffic and a bicycle chain gliding through a derailleur. Writing for broadcast comes in various flavors. I've written stories as short as 30 seconds, and as long as 30 minutes. Although it's rarer these days, the one-hour radio documentary is not unheard of. But in all broadcast formats, long or short, there's one crucial rule: Keep it moving forward. Your viewers or listeners can't flip back to the start to remind themselves what happened five minutes ago. If too much time has passed since you last introduced a character, introduce him again. The best writing for broadcast, both radio and television, involves telling a story. Stories are engaging. They give you a structure. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have characters. They set up a conflict, which helps you see a scientific issue in a more exciting way.