Matthew Hale

Media
Sometimes my research on news actually makes news. Sometimes journalists with space to fill have asked me to comment on something. Sometimes I have had something to say and just write them a letter. The following are some recent examples of these phenomena.

To put real teeth back into the license renewal system, stations should be required to create an online searchable database of their news, public affairs and children's programming. Unless the public has access to such a database, stations can easily continue to skirt their duty to serve the public interest.

From a Letter to the Editor I wrote that was published in the
New York Times, June 7, 2007

Not everyone believes candidates should be trying to contact voters as they prepare to cast their ballots. "Any candidate who tries to text message someone as they go into the voting booth is an idiot," said Matthew Hale, a professor at Seton Hall University's Center for Public Service who formerly worked for Democratic presidential candidate Bob Kerrey. "On election day, people think it is finally 'our' turn and see the act of voting almost as a refuge from the candidates and their nasty campaigns. Any candidate that violates the sanctuary of the voting booth with a text message will face the anger of some individual voters," Hale said.

From "A High-Tech Way to Skirt the Laws on Campaigning,"
Newark Star Ledger, May 27, 2007

With the Internet, blogs and YouTube, the public now has the ability to replay ad nauseam the missteps of candidates: former presidential candidate Howard Dean's scream, former Sen. George Allen's "Macaca" comment and the "Breck girl" video showing the primping of John Edwards, now a presidential candidate.

Mathew Hale, a professor and researcher who analyzes local television coverage of campaigns, said the power in videos like these isn't so much the repetition but whom viewers are receiving the information from.

"When people get political information from their friends, they tend to value it more than when they get it from a regular news source," said Hale, who works at the Center for Public Service at Seton Hall University. He noted that after receiving and watching videos, people often e-mail a back-and-forth analysis with their friends.

That a candidate can be videotaped anywhere, any time by a multitude of methods may decrease spontaneous deviations from political scripts. Which may take all the fun out of campaigns for voters.

"I think we can expect to see stiffer speeches and candidates," Hale said. "I think we aren't going to have the same off-the-cuff remarks that we used to."

From "Politicians Work to Win Laughs,"
Denver Post, April 23, 2007

Among the study's most jarring findings was in the Seattle market, where in the month before the gubernatorial election, which would turn out to be razor thin, 95 percent of the newscasts analyzed by the researchers had no reports on the race.

'Time spent on teasers, bumpers and intro music in Seattle outnumbered time covering the Washington gubernatorial race by 14 to 1,'' the researchers wrote.

In an attempt to showcase stations that did focus on local politics, Mr. Kaplan and his colleagues -- Ken Goldstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Matthew Hale, an assistant professor at Seton Hall -- cited WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas. The station devoted more than 15 percent of its campaign coverage to local races, more than double the national average of 6 percent, the researchers found.

From "In '04, Local TV Newscasts Were Light on Campaign Coverage, a Study Finds,"
New York Times, February 14, 2005