James Baker Quotes

If you are explaining, you're losing. It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.

If it doesn't go [fit] on a bumper sticker, we don't listen.

It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen.

We live in an age of sound bites and buzz words.

'The bully pulpit' is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.

There is literally no such thing as an idea that cannot be expressed well and articulately to today's voters in 30 seconds.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.

The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge.

It's no secret that the media has fragmented in recent years, that audiences have been cut into slivers, and that more and more people get their news from ever narrower outlets.

The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them.

It [television] has locked candidates into ridiculous positions because only ridiculous positions can be compacted into 30-second commercials.

Television has shortened our political discourse.

It's hard to tell what is even mainstream anymore because there's so many platforms now. And they're all topics of conversation.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

We have witnessed a stunning reversal of power between mainstream and social media: The ability to go direct to end users of information through social channels radically disrupted the mainstream news agenda.

We are such a sound-bite culture; people are so accustomed to flipping through their television so quickly that we only have just a few seconds to grab someone's attention.

I just think that a much more important part of the problem we face, which was evident 10 years ago and is even more evident now, is that the way we share information among ourselves as American citizens has been radically transformed. The line between news and entertainment has almost dissolved, where ratings now have a big impact on what kinds of stories are covered and not stories.

Before the web and these highly focused entities, journalists got to decide what was important to tell their audience and educated their readers. Now, journalists have to try and understand what their consumer actually wants to read and what angle they are looking for in order to keep audiences engaged in a highly competitive world.

I think the Reagan people are superb marketers. Their whole approach to polling, to television, to the symbolism and the rest approaches genius.

I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean - at least in my case.

I don't really read a lot. I got a few Booker Prize books and some others and thought I'd try this but quite quickly I just stick them down. I do like some Stephen King books but with some of them I just put them down as well. But I'm like that with telly stuff as well and films or music.

Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.

I like Twitter because I'm a creature of the short-attention span theater. I can get a lot of sports opinions and other things and Twitter tells me what time it is, but not how to make the watch.

Television is an important part of how we communicate.