Sound Bite Nation

 

 

My one and only time being quoted in the New York Times was just days into the first Trump presidency over 8 years ago. A colleague of mine had just been interviewed about Trump’s anti-city rhetoric, and told the reporter I would be a good source of data on cities. I spoke with the reporter for about 20 minutes and spent another 10 minutes sending them some links to publicly available data. 

Alas, out of all of that, they took a few words I said out of context, because they were looking for a reputable source to say that Trump wasn’t wrong to go after cities. Being very pro-city, my horror at being misquoted was compounded by multiple people close to me being furious that I would dare say what I said. 

This was an extreme example – an atrocious breach by the journalist, on the hottest of hot topics, in the most respected newspaper in the country – but it is indicative of a care that I as a consultant must take to not only get the facts right but also to make sure that the expression of those facts can’t be spun for nefarious purposes. While I wish that the way the news is reported by outlets and consumed by citizens is more in-depth and nuanced, I know that everyone involved is motivated to boil things down to sound bites, litmus tests, and black-and-white judgments. That’s the world we live in, so somehow we have to work within those realities, and take care accordingly. 

It is from this perspective that I have processed this month’s news about Charlie Kirk’s murder and the national conversation it has engendered. His life mission was to convert young people to the conservative movement, one public conversation at a time, with unflinching interrogation of the left-leaning beliefs held by many young people today. Supporters mourned his death, while others asked for respect for his work and sympathy for his grieving family. Opponents found it hard to stomach the accolades sent his way, calling out his own words as dangerously stoking racism, misogyny, and callousness to the destructiveness of gun violence in this country. 

Very little of the resulting discourse has heartened me. On the one hand, I have seen many times over quotes taken out of context used to prove Kirk’s bad intentions, in some cases egregiously so. Speaking of the New York Times again, this itemization of Kirk’s position on hot topics ends with the most unacceptable retraction I’ve ever read, to the effect of “We attributed an antisemitic quote to Kirk; it turns out he was quoting the quote in order to condemn it.” How's that for lazy reporting?

Many such cases, where simply watching more than the 5-second clip would soften, dispel, or completely reverse the sentiments ascribed to Kirk. I am particularly disappointed in my friends who are journalists who chose to post the sound bites and render their condemnation, rather than spend the extra time to understand that the sound bites did not reflect the sentiment being expressed and in some cases expressed the opposite. Given their lifelong training in getting the whole story, it's deflating to see them abandon that for the sake of piling on.

Nevertheless, I am incredibly sympathetic to those who felt Kirk was a hate-monger who made life more difficult for them and for those who they love. For one, while I tend to react favorably to much of his long-form content, I find some of his statements more difficult to explain even allowing for the broader context. I may be more right-leaning than most of my friends, but I accept that there's a difference between saying something contrary to what many others think, vs. saying something that comes across as ignorant and inflammatory and even dehumanizing.

I also cringe at Kirk supporters who reject every negative comment as either incorrect or insensitive. People in this country are hurting, including those who have differing perspectives than Kirk and his followers, and Kirk himself often gave them room to express themselves and empathy once they did. I wish I'd seen more of that lately, rather than statements and postures that negate people's pain.

I could say more on that, but I want to pivot to the main point of my post today, and the reason why I think back to my own experience with the national media. Kirk was himself an expert in modern communication and a prominent public figure. So he had to have known better when he put his own sound bites out with intention or at least a lack of care that they would be interpreted in ways that stoked bigotry. 

The fact of the matter is, even if Kirk is not himself racist or sexist, there are many people in this country who are, and who are emboldened by any sliver of justification and validation of their hateful beliefs. I think that, in this day and age of sound bites and outrage, and with so much hate out there, public figures like Kirk bear some responsibility to ensure that any content put out there cannot take people’s hearts in a hateful direction. And while I’m aware he often offered condemnations towards hateful ideology, he also left the door open too often. 

Perhaps this is an unnecessarily harsh standard, and as hard as I am on myself including ruing that I was sloppy when talking with the New York Times reporter so many years ago, I also extend myself grace that sometimes people have bad intentions and there’s little you can do to avoid people twisting your words for their hateful agendas. But, another part of me weighs that the stakes are extraordinarily high here: we have seen that hate can harm and even kill, so any possibility that words can be used to support hate must be rendered with extreme care. So I think it's fair to say that "I'm not racist" and "I didn't mean it" are not good enough; if we have a public megaphone, we must be extremely careful to not give any red meat to those who do mean harm.

To his credit, many times Kirk did condemn hateful ideology. And, almost all the time, Kirk engaged with people in good faith, even those who disagree wildly with him and hated him, and did so with tenderness and concern and empathy. I continue to be disappointed that so many people who should know better, especially journalists whose job it is to get the story right, have jumped on the sound bite bandwagon and are willing to condemn a person based on a few words uttered out of context. 

But I am also disappointed that folks who may, like me, be more predisposed to Kirk’s positions and methods, are willing to assert that he is completely innocent in his words and actions, and that any criticism of him is off-limits. I wish I could say that the world worked through good faith, long form, nuanced discussion, and since Kirk worked hard to do just that it was always constructive for these heated arguments. The reality is that we are a sound bite nation, and we must be aware of the great good and hard we can do with our content, even and especially when we are public figures trying to do good. It’s a mean world out there and an unforgiving public discourse, so we must take extra care not to give room for hateful energy to be supported. 

I am reminded of something I posted about Ron DeSantis a few years back. People jumped all over him for something that was misinterpreted as justifying slavery in Florida public school curriculum, which I thought was proven to be incorrect if you were willing to spend more than three seconds interrogating the actual actions. But I was also disappointed that the governor didn’t seem to care about these people’s accusations to set the record straight, seeming to be defiant and uncaring that people would jump to the wrong conclusions and get riled up unnecessarily, as if he welcomed the fact that his opponents were getting riled up rather than taking care to set the record straight so as not to give room for evildoers to run with the sentiments. 

That Charlie Kirk held reprehensible beliefs is, to me, not totally correct, since most of his seemingly most egregious statements were taken out of context, intentionally and repeatedly so. And yet, thought leaders hold responsibility to ensure that statements aren’t weaponized, even if taken out of context, and like DeSantis I didn’t see nearly enough concern to avoid such misinterpretation. Instead, there has been plenty, whether fairly or unfairly presented, for hateful people to glom onto to justify their beliefs and, unfortunately, their violent actions. Too much jumping to conclusions, hardening positions, and vilifying the other side; not nearly enough willingness to suspend past assumptions, learn a little, and sympathize with those different than those (especially those who have felt marginalized and assailed for too long). All in all, a lot here that makes me sad and scared.