The West Wing and Depictions of the American Presidency: Expanding the Domains of Framing in Political Communication

Abstract

This study uses framing to assess how the office of the President of the United States is depicted on NBC's The West Wing. This work represents a theoretical and empirical domain extension of framing in political communication, an area of study dominated by analyses of news content. Three distinct presidential depictions are analyzed: chief executive, political candidate, and private citizen. This quantitative content analysis of the 2001–2002 The West Wing television season addresses the frequency with which the fictional president performs these three roles and posits several hypotheses concerning the relative presentation of personality characteristics across contexts. All three roles are represented with substantive frequency, with the chief executive role dominating. Principled character traits are evident more often when the fictional President Bartlet is acting as chief executive than as a private citizen. Conversely, Bartlet presents more engaging personality traits when acting as a private citizen than as either chief executive or political candidate. Implications for these finding are outlined and future lines of research are detailed.

Keywords:

• The West Wing
• Framing
• Depictions
• Role display
• Entertainment television
• Politics

Notes

1. The one deviation from this policy was the first episode of the 2001–2002 season, which addressed the issue of terrorism. A disclaimer was provided at the beginning of that show stating that the episode in question was not part of the regular season and should be viewed as a special event in light of the tragedies of 11 September 2001. Indeed, commenting on the post 9/11 episode, Levin (2001) remarks, “The West Wing's speedy embrace of the subject is unusual [italics added]” (p. D1).

2. Two pieces of original programming from 2001–2002 The West Wing season were not analyzed: Isaac and Ishmael (Sorkin & Misiano, 2001), which aired on 3 October 2001, and Documentary Special (Coultouris, 2002), which aired on 24 April 2002. The former is distinct in its addressing a specific issue of national importance and caveats were provided stating that this is not the traditional The West Wing (see Note 1). The latter consisted of a mixing of previously aired The West Wing material with interviews of former President Clinton and White House staff from various administrations. Fictional The West Wing content from the 2001–2002 season contained in this episode is already being content analyzed via the inclusion of the 21 original episodes.

3. When there was a discrepancy across the three coders for any item used to obtain inter-coder reliability, the frame or personality trait code chosen by two of the three coders was chosen for that scene. There were no instances when all three coders were in complete disagreement with each other.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

R. Lance Holbert

R. Lance Holbert (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware

David A. Tschida

David A. Tschida is a Visiting Professor at Moorhead State University

Maria Dixon

Maria Dixon is an Assistant Professor at Southern Methodist University

Kristin Cherry

Kristin Cherry is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri-Columbia

Keli Steuber

Keli Steuber is a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University

David Airne

David Airne is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama