THE SOUND BITE SOCIETY: Television and the American Mind.

• Author: Fallows, James
• Position: Review

THE SOUND BITE SOCIETY: Television and the American Mind By Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls Eight Windows Publishers, $23.95

THE BEST KIND OF NON-FICTION BOOK IS the one that leaves you thinking: "Of course! That's right! Now I understand how it all works." But since those are rare, it's good that there is also value in the book that leaves you unconvinced but makes you actually stop to think about why you disagree.

The Sound Bite Society is valuable in this second way. To me, its central argument just does not hold up. (Even one of the book jacket blurbs, by Victor Navasky of The Nation, says "I'm not sure I buy" the main thesis of the book.) But I found thinking about the holes in--and implications of--Jeffrey Scheuer's argument more stimulating and enjoyable than simply nodding along with a number of other books. And in making his case he offers a number of incidental insights that are original and ring true.

Scheuer's intention is to connect two aspects of modern life that, taken one by one, are beyond dispute. One is television's increasing dominance of culture in general and political discourse in particular. Compared to a generation ago, politicians spend more time thinking about TV coverage; journalism is more talk- and TV-centric; TV ads matter more; and the general tone of political discussion is both choppier (because of ever shorter sound-bites) and more visually-oriented. The other trend is the modern conservative ascendancy, from Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 through the Republican victory in the House of Representatives in 1994--or as Scheuer puts it on the first page of the book, "the nearly complete collapse of American liberalism in the face of a resurgent New Right."

The assertion of sweeping conservative victory is what would leave some right-wingers unconvinced by Scheuer's book. After all, they would say, they've permanently lost the abortion battle; they've had to stomach a Democrat in the White House through the 1990s; they feel under siege on a variety of cultural fronts. But what Scheuer means by a conservative victory is the clear shift-to-the-right of the center of political argument. Everyone complains about today's health care system, but almost no one dares talk about the kind of government-run, single-payer approach prevalent in the rest of the world. Clinton has stayed in office largely through the Dick Morris strategy of pre-empting the most attractive parts of the Republican agenda. The labor movement is...