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: soundbite and 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 hand may,

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 that when dodges go undetected it is because listeners

evaluate speakers 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 question asked 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 category was “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 corpora but 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 by seasoned 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 between somewhat 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 question

Replies that somehow address question

Restate answer already given “As I’ve already said … “ 9Reply with platitude “All beginnings are hard … “ (1)Reply partially Answer only some of several

criticisms in question8

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 … “ 6Attack question “That’s not the issue at all.” 4Attack 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 … 1Table 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 frequent in 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 reports that 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 specific indictment: 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 politicians who 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 this I still see as necessary. On the other hand we should realize that artful dodging is not

only politicians’ fault, but results from a vicious circle. Politicians have increasingly learned to fall

back on dodging ploys because journalists have increasingly been bent on nailing them to some

kind of guilt. Finlayson (2001) opposes this practice; instead, he says, “For most democracies,

political discussion should, ultimately, be carried 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 who see themselves as representatives of the

people, mandated to expose wrongdoings and suppressed truths. In this optic politicians are seen as

wily foxes, while hard-talking interviewers are the fearless ferrets that ferret them out, forcing them

them to 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-examination aimed 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 have

actually 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

substantiate an 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.”

http://journalisten.dk/krasnik-spurgte-boedskov-om-det-samme-28-gange#.UW-vbckDPgo.twitter

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 on a 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.

In all of this we see one important symptom of a larger, more systemic calamity in modern

democracies. The overall problem not only affects interviews where talking points are used to

dodge critical questions, but also media-sponsored debates, parliamentary debates and, more

broadly, most genres of political journalism and political discourse, including what passes for

debate in the online sphere: The central vice not only of artful dodging in interviews and debates

but in all of this is a refusal to deliberate. By deliberation I understand the practice of weighing or

balancing pros and cons, refuting the cons if possible, but otherwise acknowledging them, and, if

they are acknowledged, indicating why one considers that the pros outweigh the cons.

What is particularly important in this definition is the notion that when we talk about political

proposals, and generally about what is often referred to as practical reasoning, then there will the

standard case be several relevant arguments available, both pro and con. Of course there will also be

lots of irrelevant arguments, and a debater who is met with these will then need to refute them by

showing them to be irrelevant. But even so, there will in principle be relevant arguments both for

and against any proposal. This is where deliberation comes in, in the literal sense of the word:

weighing. If there are relevant arguments for my proposal and also certain relevant arguments

against it, and if I am met with these in a debate, then it is my deliberative obligation to tell the

reasons why I think on the whole the arguments that speak for my proposal are all in all weightier

than the ones that speak against it. I have this obligation because the audience—which may be the

entire electorate—needs to hear these reasons, and well as my opponent’s reasons for differing from

me.

It is this obligation that artful dodgers in political interviews and debates prefer to evade, most

often by means of talking points, and it is this obligation that interviewers should not allow them to

evade. One reason why both sets of reasons, representing both sides of the issue, must be heard is

that the weighing that takes place here is not a weighing in the literal, physical and objective sense.

There is a significant element of subjectivity in it that implies that what has much weight for one

citizen may has less weight for another, and members of the audience may thus have different

assessments of which side has most weight on its scale. This is an essential fact of practical

reasoning, which implies that there is no objective truth about which proposal must be chosen; the

choice of any of them is actually a legitimate choice—or, to adopt Aristotle’s formulation from the

Eudemian Ethics, “the proairesis is not either true or false” (1226a).

This summary view of what practical reasoning is like, and why it should involve real

deliberation with real answers, follows in the footsteps of Aristotle, as interpreted in particular by

the philosopher Anthony Kenny. He sums it by emophasizing that in practical reasoning we debate

proposals, not just propositions, and says: “If a proposition is true, then it is not also false; but if a

project or proposal or decision is good, that does not exclude its being also, from another point of

view, bad.” (Kenny 1979, p. 146) Interpreting Aristotle’s thinking, he also asserts: "if the

conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning has the imperative form ‘Pursue this’ or ‘Avoid that’ it

is not something which can itself be straightforwardly described as true or false." (Kenny 1979, p.

94)

The nature of practical reasoning, as described by Kenny, implies that, in principle, we cannot

haverecognize a logically valid inference from any set of premises to a practical conclusion on what

to do. Instead we must have real deliberation performed before our eyes and ears so that each one of

us can undertake what is sometimes referred to as “deliberation within” (Goodin 2000) and make

our individual choices. Political debates and interviews should serve this function, but when artful

dodging takes over, they malfunction.

Who is to blame? Politicians or the media? It’s a chicken-or-egg problem. Politicians and

journalists have driven each other into a kind of stalemate, helped by communication consultants—

who have often had a leg in each camp, first as reporters, then as spin-doctors, and sometimes going

back again.

I would like to conclude by quoting the well-known journalist Ian Katz, editor of BBC’s well-

regarded program Newsnight.

In 2014 he wrote a piece in Financial Times in which he deplored the form that political interviews in the

media had evolved into and expressed a wish for what we might call a truly deliberative kind of dialogue—

one where reasons both pro and con are expressed, and where relevant considerations from the other side are

recognized and responded to. The following passage suggests that not only a journalists like himself but also

some politicians harbour this wish:

I asked a thoughtful Tory minister what the interview he wished he could give would look like.

He replied without a moment’s hesitation: “I’d like to be able to come in and say, ‘Here’s the

policy I’ve just announced. There are quite a few problems with it; I’ll tell you what they are.

Now let me tell you about the other two options I had available, and why both of them were

worse.’ ”

Katz went on to say:

Wouldn’t it be great if interviews allowed politicians to talk as candidly about the messy reality

of political decision-making as these two wish they could?

There are risks for both sides in any shift from the current sullen equilibrium. For us, the

danger is that we offer politicians more time and space to explain themselves and they carry on

just as defensively as before. Or that audiences tell us with their remote controls that, actually,

they rather preferred heat to light. For politicians the risk is that they are more honest in

interviews and find themselves pilloried the next morning for making a gaffe or displaying

anything other than cast iron certainty about everything. To break the stand-off both sides have

to jump at once.

Bull, Peter, and Kate Mayer. "How not to answer questions in political interviews." Political Psychology (1993): 651-666.Finlayson, Alan. "The problem of the political interview." The Political Quarterly 72.3 (2001): 335-344.Goodin, Robert E. "Democratic deliberation within." Philosophy & Public Affairs 29.1 (2000): 81-109.Ian Katz. 2014. “The death of the political interview”. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bd0b95c4-3477-11e4-b81c-00144feabdc0.html 7. Sep. 2014.Kenny, Anthony. 1979. Aristotle’s Theory of the Will. London: Duckworth.Kock, Christian. 2013. De svarer ikke: Fordummende uskikke i den politiske debat. Udvidet og opdateret. Gyldendal, København. Kock, Christian, & Magnus Boding Hansen. 2015. De lytter ikke: Politikeres udenomssnak - spot den, stop den. København: Hans Reitzel.Rogers, Todd, and Michael I. Norton. "The artful dodger: Answering the wrong question the right way." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 17.2 (2011): 139-147.