Dear Mr. President: Changing Media Environments and the Social Construction of the President

Abstract

Although there has been a great deal of research on the impact of new media on the ways in which presidents present themselves, less attention has been given to the ways in which these media shape the social construction of the president. This study focuses on how one public, those who write letters to presidents, expresses their sense of the role of the president in different media environments. Letters written to Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and London Johnson were examined for clues as to how changes in media environments were linked to changes in the letter-writers’ constructions of presidents. The results of this research suggest that changes in the media environment do indeed have an impact on the social construction of the president.

Notes

The numbers listed after the quotes from the letters were assigned for ease of identification during the research process. The locations of the letters (and in some cases numbers assigned to them) are listed in the appendix at the end of this article.

In Holzer’s (1993) collection of letters to Abraham Lincoln, there are a few letters responding to the Emancipation Proclamation, but even that document produced only a small number of responses when compared with the letters seeking political appointments.

I have referred to the president as “he” in this paper because all of the presidents researched were men. This is only meant to reflect the current state of our political system and should not be interpreted as a description of future presidents.