Soundbites as Artful Dodging
Abstract:
While soundbites and one-line slogans are everywhere in campaigns and other would-be persuasive genres of political communication, it is also worth attending to the ways in which politicians systematically use carefully crafted morsels of non-committal verbiage to evade critical questions and counterarguments – in ways that do not make the evasive intention too obvious. We may call this Artful Dodging (with thanks to Charles Dickens). For several years, the main piece of advice routinely offered by communication consultants to politicians, and practiced in debates and media interviews, can be summarized as follows: Evade questions while appearing to answer them, and then quickly counterattack. I shall focus on how soundbites are constructed and used to serve the former of these functions, that of dodging artfully.
When the topic is artful dodging in interviews and debates, there are two related phenomena whose relationship we need to consider:soundbiteand talking point. In a sense they are the same; each term designates a carefully crafted piece of discourse that is apt to be used with little regard for the context. In regard to their intrinsic features, the two phenomena are often similar. However, a soundbite is a snippet that gets selected and repeated by the media for such use. The snippet has in many cases been carefully crafted by a politician or that politician’s copywriter with the ingention that audiences and media should recognize its rhetorical qualities and disseminate it; typipcal cases might be John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for; ask what you can do for youor country”. It is something the politician says once on a high-profile occasion and which is circulated and repeated by the media. There may also, as I believe Lisa Villadsen will remind us today, be soundbites not intended by their sources to be thus repeated, but nevertheless they are. A talking point, on the other hand, is a piece of discourse,also carefully crafted by a politician or copywriter, and then used by the politician himself or herself on any number of occasions. The features that qualify a piece of discourse to be either a soundbite or a talking point have a great deal of overlap, but those features are not my focus here. Instead the topic is soundbites as artful dodging in debates and interviews. But in light of the distinction I made before it is more appropriate to talk about talking points as artful dodging. There are other uses of soundbites (or “talking points”) than this, and there are also other types of artful dodging. But our topic now is the intersection of two lines of inquiry: the role of soundbites in political communication; and artful dodging in political debates and interviews.
Not long ago this issue drew a lot of attention when the Florida Senator Marco Rubio was rebuked by a rival, Governor Chris Christie, for his over-dependence on talking points in a debate between the contenders for the Republican candidacy for President.
The moderator had questioned Rubio’s qualifications for the Presidency because of his limited political experience.Rubio listed some of his alleged accomplishments as Senator and then went on:
and let’s dispel once and for all with [sic] this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he is doing. He knows exactly what he is doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world. That’s why he passed Obamacare, and the Stimulus, and Dodd-Frank, and the deal with Iran. It’s a systematic effort to change America. When I am President of the united States we’re gonna re-embrace all the things that made America the greatest nation in the world, and we are gonna leave our children what they deserve: the single greatest nation in the history of the world.
Here, Christie came in and pointedly attacked Rubio’s scant experience. Rubio countered as follows, forst lashing out at Christie’s performance as Governor of New Jersey:
They’ve been downgraded nine times in their credit rating. This country already has a debt problem. We don’t need to add to it by electing someone who has experience at running up and destroying the credit rating of a state. But I would add this: Let’s dispel with [sic] this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he is doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country. He wants America to become more like the rest of the world. We don’t wanna be like the rest of the world. We wanna be the United States of America. And when I’m elected President, this will become once again the single greatest nation in the history of the worldno—not the disaster Barack Obama has imposed upon us.
This is where Christie did what media have described as “destroying” Rubio:
That’s what Washington DC does. The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech--that is exactly what his advisors gave him." [Applause.] See, Marco, the thing is this: When you're President of the United States, when you're governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn't solve one problem for one person. …
We have see an example of how prepacked talking points irrelevant to the issue at handmay, when caught in flight, fly back in the face of the politician using them. This is one heartening detail from a campaign that has given us many disquieting moments. It is significant because arguably many citizens in our Western democracies are getting fed up with talking points and their use for artful dodging such as politicians have routinely practiced in debates and interviews for decades. It is a plausible assumption that for a long while most citizens were not sensitive to dodgy answers, but now they increasingly are.
In an innovative experiment Rogers & Norton (2011) found that listeners are generally quite tolerant of answers that do not answer the actual question asked, but a similar one; only when the question addressed in the answer is egregiously different from the one actually asked does dodge detection tend to take place. Further, it seems thatwhen dodges go undetected it is because listenersevaluatespeakers on social dimensions rather than with regard to the topical relevance of their answers. However, Rogers & Norton’s studies suggest that listeners’ dodge detection can be promoted if they are prepared to listen for dodges, or when the questionasked is kept visible for them during speakers’ answers. A detected dodge is then likely to cause a strong negative evaluation of the speaker. This may be what happened to Rubio when Christie nailed his repeated use of an irrelevant talking point.
At least since the ‘90s there has been research on artful dodging in the media. In Britain, Bull and Mayer (1993 and others) counted non-replies and found 11 types. The vast majority of cases belonged to the type “Makes political point”—which happens to be the place where “artful dodging” and “talking points” intersect; in the data set 76 % of Margaret Thatcher’s non-replies were of this type, against Neil Kinnock's 66.7 %. The second largest categorywas “Attacks the question”, which accounts for 25.9 % of Thatcher’s non-replies and 36.8 % of Kinnock’s. The full table follows here.
Unlike Bull & Mayer’s study, my own work on artful dodging does not include quantitative analyses of large corporabut rather theoretical reflection on representative examples. I suggest that a more systematic and inclusive classification is possible than Bull and Mayer’s studies, however interesting, have offered. Also, as will be clear below, we may define interesting subtypes of non-replies that have not been given separate categories in their study, but in their material there have no doubt been occurrences of them that have then been placed under other categories, such as the rather spacious “Ignores the question”. It is interesting in our context to note how questions are ignored, and what sorts of material are used byseasoned politicians to substitute for a satisfactory reply. For example, I propose the category “Displace topic of question”, which is interesting as it represents a sort of half-way house betweensomewhat satisfactory replies and others that are quite deficient, but which may nevertheless to mask the deficiency. Further, it is possible to make a meaningful subcategorization in this category. The Danish rhetoricians Gabrielsen, Pontoppidan and Jønch-Clausen (2011) have done so in a study of deficient answers buy the Danish Prime Minister in press conferences. They found three main subtypes: temporal displacement, agent displacement, and level displacement.
In the table below, the column “Definition/Example” explains what we are to understand by each type. The thinner the grey shade in the right-hand column, they farther are these types from achieving adequacy as answers.To supplement the table, I will give just two authentic examples of politicians using talking points to dodge questions.
Main types / Subtypes / Definition/Example / Bull & Mayer types / Degree of relevance to questionReplies that somehow address question / Restate answer already given / “As I’ve already said … “ / 9
Reply with platitude / “All beginnings are hard … “ / (1)
Reply partially / Answer only some of several criticisms in question / 8
Blankly dismiss question / “I can dismiss that completely. Next question.” / ?
Displace topic of question / Temporal displacement / E.g., a question on future action is answered with reference to past actions / 1/8?
Agent displacement / E.g., a question on e government actions is answered with reference to the opposition’s actions / 1/8?
Level displacement / E.g., a question on faulty research underlying a policy is answered with reference to the uncertain nature of all science / 1/8?
Distort question / A “straw man” version of a critical question is answered instead of the original one / 1/8?
Replies that address situation / Claim impossibility to answer / “I am not at liberty … “ / 6
Attack question / “That’s not the issue at all.” / 4
Attack questioner / “You only say that to boost your ratings.” / 5
Replies that ignore question (1) and situation / Restate political point (“soundbite”/talking point) / “Barack Obama knows what he is doing. …” / 7
Attack opposition / “Under the previous administration …” / 1
Other … / 1
Table 1: Types of artful dodging (“non-replies”). The thinner the grey shade in the right-hand column, they farther are these types from achieving adequacy as answers.
The type Restate political point (“soundbite”/talking point) is by far the most frequentin Bull& Mayer’s count, and it is the one that should draw our main interest because demarcates cases where soundbites are clearly used to dodge questions. One Danish example is this:
In 2006 the Danish Minister of Employment, now a powerful Minister of Finance, was asked about a hot topic in Danish politics, the ”cash help ceiling” that puts a rather austere cap on how much social welfare recipients may receive. This legislation is allegedly driven by the argument that ”it should pay to work”, and lower cash help is meant to make work pay better. However, a report from the Ministry itself had shown that the cash help ceiling did not cause many of the recipients to find jobs. The question to the Minister was:
” Having seen this report, will you do something to help this specific group of people?”
He answered:
”To me, the cash help ceiling remains in place. It is not acceptable that it does not pay to work. It is unthinkable at large groups in Danish society should find that it doesn’t pay to work. We cannot have a system in Denmark where we deliberately put rules in place saying that it shouldn’t pay to work. It is simply the cornerstone of a society that it should pay to work.”
Four of five sentences here end epiphorically with the soundbite “it should pay to work”. Thus the Minister hammers away at one single argument in favour of his policy--something that philosophers would call a deontic principle: it simply is not right of it doesn’t pay to work. The questioner, however, cited a consequentialist argument: that only very few cash help recipients have found jobs. Another consequentialist counterargument is often cited on this issue, namely that lower cash help merely reduces more people to abject poverty. The Minister does not address any of these arguments at all.
Next, a British example of the type “level displacement”.A news item in the Evening Standard from July 2011 reportsthat the number of people on six-figure salaries at London’s City Hall has more than doubled over just three years. A Green Party Assembly member is quoted as saying that “in an age of austerity with rising living costs it shows very bad judgment.” A spokesman for Mayor Boris Johnson says in reply:
This is a frugal administration that makes savings wherever possible. This is shown by the fact that that we are heading for a four-year freeze in our share of the council tax whereas under the previous administration it increased by 153 per cent. (Evening Standard July 7, 2011.)
The displacement of level occurs when the spokesman speaks about the city administration’s alleged general frugality but bypasses the specificindictment: the sharp increase in the number of high-salary city officials.
What I have said so far might create the impression that politicians (and their spokespersons and consultants) are alone to blame for the problem of politicians’ dodgy answers. It is indeed a problem, and one remedy might obviously be to require journalists to be sharper and more persistent in following up to force out a valid reply, or otherwise expose the politician’s failure to give one. In 2015, I co-authored, with a, investigative journalist who is also a former student of mine,a book based on this premise. Its Danish title means They Are Not Listening. This refers both to politicianswho act as if they are not listening to the questions actually asked, and to journalists, who often seem not to hear the answers they get and let them pass even when they are quite unsatisfactory. This book was in a sense a sequel to an earlier book of mine, They Are Not Answering (2011/2013), in which I singled out artful dodging as perhaps the worst of several vices that together have a stultifying effect on political debate. The second book told journalists, among other things, that they should point out specifically to dodging politicians in what respect their answers were deficient, and also that they should concentrate more on arguing with them, presenting counterarguments and requiring honest answers to these.
All thisI stillsee as necessary. On the other hand we should realize that artful dodging is not only politicians’ fault, but results froma vicious circle. Politicians have increasingly learned to fall back on dodging ploys because journalists have increasingly been bent on nailing them to somekind of guilt. Finlayson (2001) opposes this practice; instead, he says, “For most democracies, political discussion should, ultimately, becarried out through argument” (341).Further, he finds that we “need to find out what policies are being implemented and what the justification for them might be. …political discussion and analysis should be concerned with debating the policies, proposals and philosophies of politicians, parties and governments” (342).But, he also finds, political interviews have been marred by journalists whosee themselves as representatives of the people, mandated to expose wrongdoings and suppressed truths. In this optic politicians are seen as wily foxes,whilehard-talking interviewers are the fearless ferrets that ferret them out, forcing them themto admit to untruths or other kinds of wrongdoing, such as misuse of power, bungling, promise-breaking, mind-changing, inconsistency, disruption within their ranks, etc. What should have been deliberative dialogue on policies, carried out through argument, has tended to become forensic cross-examinationaimed at exposing personal guilt. In response, politicians have developed an extreme wariness not only of being exposed in these interviews themselves but also of what might result later if any time in such an interview they lower their parades. If for example a cabinet minister were to admit in an interview that there are things to be said against his own policies, or good questions about it that have no glib anseers, then politicians’ fear has been that such an admission would generate headlines in next day’s tabloids, saying that the minister denounces his own proposal, or is revolting against the party leadership, or the like. Desperate to avoid this, politicians have tended to clam up and use artful dodging even when interviewers haveactually tried to engage them in a deliberative give-and-take of arguments, counterarguments and replies.
A notorious and illuminating example from Danish mediated politics occurred in 2013, when the hard-talking journalist Martin Krasnik interviewed the Minister of Justice, Morten Bødskov, on a proposed revision of the public administration act. The revised law would reduce public access to internal documents exchanged in ministries in preparation for new legislation. The argument for this was that it would create a much needed free space for candid exchange of political ideas and considerations in the preparatory phase of legislation, and this would significantly improve the political process. By some accounts Krasnik asked the minister 28 times in 30 minutes if he could produce just one example of the legislative process having been hampered by the openness that existed under the old law. This request was a fair deliberative move, urging the minister to substantiatean argument he had used for his new law. He dodged every time. Instead of providing the requested example, he repeatedly cited the need for politicians to have a ”confidential space … where there is no insecurity regarding the risk of things suddenly reaching the front pages.” The interviewer was not out to nail him to some kind of wrongdoing but rather to make him participate in discussion through argument. Yet the minister was so conditioned to dodging critical questions of any kind that he preferred to fall back ona talking point—which was significant in itself, insofar as it revealed an undoubtedly important reason for this behavior: politicians are so scared, not only of being nailed on direct TV, but also of being crucified on next day’s front pages, that dodging, usually with by means of talking points, becomes their standard strategy.