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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]