This paper will analyze the article "The West Wing and Depictions of the American Presidency: Expanding the Domains of Framing in Political Communication" in order to evaluate its content, writing style, and overall contribution to the field of communication. The article analyzes one full season of the television show the West Wing to examine the three main presidential depictions in the show: the president as chief executive, the president as candidate, and the president as private citizen. Through this analysis, the authors aim to examine the role of framing in political communication. We will see that while the paper is well written and thoroughly researched, in the end the entire paper rests on a faulty premise and is thus not a valuable contribution to the field.
The authors begin the article by noting that despite the pervasive news coverage of the American presidency, citizens do not generally gain access to the behind the scenes reality of the daily life of the president. The authors then make a very tenuous assertion, upon which their entire article is based: they assert that "the West Wing provides audience members with a view of the internal workings of the White House. This fictional show offers something to the American public that it cannot get from any other source: an insider's view of what it is like to be president on a daily basis" (Holbert et al, 506). This problematic statement is offered up front, without any kind of explanation of the shortfalls of using a fictional television show produced in Hollywood to gain insights into the inner workings of a White House. There are any number of ways in which the show can, and certainly does, mischaracterize the political process and the White House. We will return to this point later, but it is important to note that the rest of this article hinges upon this most tenuous of lynch-pins.
The authors then go on to explain that they will use framing theory...