Against the background of the re-constructive character of media reporting (section 1), this article explains the concept of ›news narratives‹ (2). Then the role and previous research of sound bites and their narrative integration are discussed (3). Explanations of the research question, corpus and method (4) are followed by quantitative and then more detailed exemplary qualitative analyses (5). Here, contributions from the Swiss »Tagesschau« and the American »CBS Evening News« since the 1960s are analyzed. It becomes apparent that the coverage is increasingly narrative in a narrower sense, that this development took place earlier in the USA, and that the argumentative functionalization of original sound clips can be reconstructed but remains implicit.