Here is the REAL problem…
“…give sound-bite answers that are overly parsed by a media…”
and this is a media created problem.
Back around 1983 or so there was a discussion on TV (PBS?) where all living ex-presidential chiefs of staff sat around and talked about stuff.
There was only one topic on which they all agreed. That was when the moderator made a snide comment about politicians only talking in sound bites.
The short answer is that the CoS all agreed that pols had to talk in sound bites because that’s all media would publish. And this way, at least they got to craft their own sound bite message rather than have the “unbiased” media do it for them.
If the media would report complex, nuanced arguments and positions WITHOUT generating nothing but parsed sound bites, maybe we’d have some real debates.
It will take at least two generations for the trust to be rebuilt if we started now.
Don’t bet on it.
