A Bite in the Right Direction : CBS Evening News will air no candidate comment less than 30 seconds long

Try this experiment sometime. Turn on your TV and then turn it off three seconds after the picture appears. Ask yourself whether you have been watching a program or a commercial. Chances are you will know immediately which it was.

Why? First, production values are much higher in commercials. A gorgeous coastline at sunset, a mountain vista of godlike nobility--this is the stuff of four-wheel vehicle ads. Your eye will tell you that instantly. Second, because advertisers pay thousands of dollars for each second of air time, they make each word count. The pauses between words often are edited down to the minimum that comprehension requires. Your ear hears the difference at once.

When it comes to political commercials for presidential candidates, there too no expense is spared in trying to present a picture of perfection. But a campaign commercial bears little resemblance to real life, in which no mortal, formulating sentences as he or she goes, can produce the preternaturally perfect economy of a TV ad.

And so we welcome, as an act of mercy toward the candidates and of common sense toward the television audience, the CBS Evening News decision to air no presidential candidate comment less than 30 seconds long.

Thirty seconds may not sound like much, but the average “sound bite” has recently been clocked at just 7.3 seconds. (One major exception to the sound-bite treatment is the exposure that candidates are getting this political season on cable TV, where long interviews often are conducted.)

Peggy Noonan, a former Reagan speech writer, takes credit for inventing the sound bite. When working in television news, she noticed that a flashy, well-turned, and--above all-- brief sentence would invariably be the one chosen for broadcasting. After leaving TV, she put a few of those zingers into every speech she wrote. It worked like a charm.

But we don’t think the medium should be the message. A President delivering made-for-TV zingers to foreign heads of state? To leaders of Congress? Do we laugh or groan? No, let’s hear each candidate in some approximation--even a 30-second approximation--of how he, as President, would sound in the real world.