In 1968, presidential candidates were given an average of forty-three seconds for uninterrupted speech on network evening newscasts. By 1988 the average soundbite had shrunk to 9.8 seconds. Four years later another 1.4 seconds had been lopped off, and the early returns for 1996, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Media and Public Affairs, show the average soundbite down once again -- to 7.2 seconds.

These familiar numbers are invariably used to support grim conclusions about the state of journalism, the republic, and perhaps even our capacity for reasoned thought. I find such conclusions a bit hasty. Longer soundbites would not necessarily elevate television news or political discourse in general, and better use of short ones might.

 Mine is not a widely held view. Speaking for many, former CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite charged, "They're picking out a few words that don't even have nouns and verbs in them. That's no way to present the issues of the day." His solution was to lobby for free air time for candidates, partly as a supplement to the nightly news reports.

 Cronkite's proposal is on the right track but his critique of the newscast is not. Citizens certainly deserve more opportunities to hear out the candidates -- not just reporters interpreting the views of the candidates -- but the evening newscasts don't have to be given over to that service.

 "TV news is a whole package," notes ABC News political director Hal Bruno. "There are many other programs on television where candidates get to speak at great length." They include Nightline, the morning and Sunday shows, plus offerings on C-SPAN, CNN, public television, and various other cable networks. In addition, Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC have agreed, persuaded in part by Cronkite and his confederates, to provide the major-party candidates with various additional opportunities to explain themselves. It will take some deft remote work indeed to avoid extended visits with the candidates this fall.

 Certainly, it is important for the evening newscasts, too, to pitch in with some regular looks at candidates in action; however, their primary responsibility is to explore the issues of the day. Longer soundbites don't necessarily deepen those explorations. Politicians can produce four sentences of empty rhetoric as easily as one.

 Nor is quoting a candidate's words during a stump speech always the best way to present that candidate's position. "The differences between the Republican and Democratic plans for Medicare may be the most important issue in this campaign," suggests Martin Plissner, executive political director at CBS News. "To describe it, using only the mere words candidates use in their speeches, is extremely difficult."

In lieu of and in between the sound-bites, the network newscasts rely to a large extent on the wordings of their reporters. For good reason: television reporters, like their counterparts in print, are trained to provide clear, concise, reasonably fair-minded explanations of the positions of candidates.

 Even in print, where the reporters are not so restricted by a stopwatch, the quotes aren't much longer. Plissner once sat down and counted the words in newsmagazine and newspaper quotations -- "inkbites," he dubbed them -- and found them to be about the same as television soundbites. Newspapers do have the space to support their inkbites with much more information, explanation, and context. But does that mean television journalists should surrender what little space they do have to longer soundbites?

 Television, of course, also explores issues through images, and plenty of other enlightening visuals are available to it besides a candidate's "talking head." Videotape reports can show us where and upon whom proposals might have an impact; they can offer us glimpses of supporters and opponents, contributors and protesters, of spontaneous interactions and charged moments -- not just those familiar pairs of moving lips.

 Many more such images are now being squeezed into television reports, sometimes in quick-cut montages of places, faces, institutions, and activities. We're familiar with the downside of this MTV style: a frantic feeling; a tendency to fall back on effects for effects' sake, on "visual candy"; and the well-founded suspicion that these "carefully selected" images can be packaged by the campaign as calculatedly as any soundbite. But as advertisers have long understood, fast-cut images present significant amounts of information in seemingly insignificant slivers of time. Maybe each of these pictures is not worth a thousand words, but the thousand pictures broadcast each week on each newscast certainly add up.

 And television journalists now have another alternative to relying on lengthy soundbites: using computerized graphics.

"I always said the one thing television didn't report very well was lists and numbers," Bob Schieffer, CBS's chief Washington correspondent, says. "Now we can give people lists and numbers in a way they can understand." Because these computerized graphics can move, we can actually watch dollar-signs being distributed; we can actually watch diagrams change in response to various plans.

"If you want to get the main element of, say, a welfare proposal out to people in any reasonable amount of time," Plissner explains, "to simply have its proponent speak into a camera is nowhere near as effective as using graphics and using the economy of language you get by writing a script."

Four years ago, Dan Rather and Erik Sorenson, then executive producer of the CBS Evening News, decreed that no statement from a presidential candidate could be broadcast on their newscast unless it ran at least thirty seconds. By the end of the campaign, soundbites on CBS were running about the same as on ABC and NBC, an average of 8.3 seconds.

 Different CBS producers and executives supply different explanations for the failure of that thirty-second rule. "It was because the candidates didn't speak in thirty-second bites," Susan Zirinsky, former head of the political unit, says. For Sorenson, "It became trickier with three major candidates in the race to find time for three thirty-second sound-bites each night."

Plissner, without disagreeing, adds another explanation that is blunter and more telling: "It was an interesting experiment, but after we tried it, we didn't really like the stories. The pieces, when you got them, weren't as good."

 Television news reports will improve as their use of narration, visuals, graphics, and soundbites improves -- not by plumping one element back up at the expense of the others.

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