The Media's Sticky Sound-Bite Culture

Overall, the response to Barack Obama's inaugural address was very favorable. The news media gave it high marks, and no doubt most of the American public was quite positive about the speech.

Particularly at times like these, reporters and pundits like to pull out historical yardsticks and proclaim their measurements.

Much of the punditry that I heard and read was a bit reserved about the historic stature of Obama's speech. One way or another, journalists were inclined to label it good — but not great.

The last truly great inaugural address, we're often told, was John F. Kennedy's blueblood barnburner in January 1961. It was literary and soaring, poetic and overarching. The cadence, language and grandeur of that speech long ago became legendary.

In real time, it's hard to imagine how present-day inaugural rhetoric could meet the benchmark of this JFK line, perhaps the most famous and revered of modern American politics: "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."

At least implicitly, Obama's inaugural words sounded a theme of generational change, but it was hardly the brash sort of proclamation that came from the youthful Kennedy: "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ... "

And there was Kennedy's stirring pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

At the time, the Cold War was about as frigid as it ever got, and JFK's first presidential speech captured — and fed — the zeitgeist.

We live in the midst of a much more sound-bitten media today, with emphasis on the pithy few words that can replay endlessly on television.

Instead, from Obama's inaugural address we got a rigorously constructed presentation of worldview and attitude. The tone and implications were the essence, as in this passage: "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics."

And then came this declaration, more a mouthful than a sound bite: "We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."

I'm an opinion columnist, and I make no claim to "objectivity." In this case, while I've often criticized Obama, my support for his presidential candidacy included my role as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. So I don't pretend to be nonpartisan here.

Barack Obama's inaugural address may not have been as "great" as the one delivered by John Kennedy. From a media standpoint, it wasn't as dazzling. But from a practical standpoint of looking to the future with nuance and substance and wisdom, what Obama had to say with his first few hundred words as president may have been even better than JFK's fabled oratory.

Flowery rhetoric has limited value. So, too, does the turn of phrase that lends itself to a beloved sound bite. Obama did better than that. But whatever the merits of the new president's first speech, the merits of his future policies should undergo tough scrutiny from the news media.

Norman Solomon wrote the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

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