Nothing in sound can be cited until it has a position

A claim you cannot point to is a claim nobody can check.

Written work has an addressing system so ordinary that its absence is startling. Pages, sections, paragraphs: anybody can say where a claim appears and anybody else can go and look. Audio has nothing comparable by default. A listener who wants to refer to something they heard is reduced to paraphrase, and paraphrase is where accuracy goes to erode. The claim gets softened or sharpened in the retelling, and there is no practical way for a third party to check which happened.

Positions in time are the substitute, and they are a weaker one than a page reference because they are not stable in the way a printed page is. Still, a moment that can be located is a moment that can be examined, disputed, and quoted properly. Combined with a written equivalent, it gives the material the same basic accountability that any other published explanation carries. Without either, spoken claims float free of verification, which suits nobody who is trying to be believed for good reasons.

This matters most exactly where audio is most persuasive. A voice making a serious factual claim with warmth and confidence is very hard to argue with and very easy to misremember. The discipline of making every substantive claim locatable is what stops the medium's intimacy from becoming a way of avoiding scrutiny. It is a small amount of work that converts a performance into something a reasonable person can hold you to.