the.com/sound bite

means A short, punchy quote pulled from a longer speech or interview because it's catchy enough to air on the news.

from Born in broadcast journalism around the mid-20th century as editors literally timed how many seconds — a 'bite' — of a speaker's audio they could cut and splice into a report. By the 1980s it had become a term of media criticism, describing how politicians learned to speak in pre-packaged, quotable chunks tailored to survive the edit.