The President as Character
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loses, what works and what doesn’t, and what it means to be a
man or a woman (528).
For the viewers of Commander in Chief, what it means to be a woman—
even a woman who is the leader of the free world—is to put family first. In fact,
in the opening episode of Commander in Chief Allen’s family—including
teenage twins Horace and Rebecca and 10-year-old Amy—have a say in
whether she decides to take the job as president or to resign and let Nathan
Templeton move into the Oval Office. On The West Wing, Bartlet’s family
appears very infrequently throughout the first season and the critical decisions
that he makes—even the decision in the third season about whether to run for reelection given the fact that he has multiple sclerosis and is under investigation
for hiding that during his first presidential run—are more the result of his
discussions with his staff or of his own internal sense of what’s right than they
are of family considerations. Jed Bartlet is a decisive president; Mackenzie
Allen is conflicted. His family exists on the margins of the show; hers is front
and center. The result is a character who does little to challenge the dominant
female paradigms on television.
Gender Frames in the Media
What cultivation theory tells us is that the frames that television and other
forms of media use to portray men and women—and fictional presidents—can
have lasting effects on public perception about women, and particularly about
women in leadership roles. Frames, which are the narratives that the mass media
use to organize events and make sense of them, are the persistent patterns that
show up in news coverage and other media portrayals (Reese 11-12). As Robert
Entman wrote:
To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and
make them more salient in communicating a text, in such a
way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal
interpretation,
moral
evaluation,
and/or
treatment
recommendation (52).
Too often these frames are very grounded in stereotypical perceptions of gender
roles. Hillary Clinton, when she was first lady and was trying to redefine that
role for women, was maligned in the media for comments she made about
choosing to work as an attorney rather than staying home to bake cookies. And
media coverage of her often focused on her changing hairstyles and wardrobe
(Garrett 182-83). In her 2008 presidential run, news stories have talked about
her choice of pantsuits, her wardrobe color choices, and her decision to wear a
camisole under her suit jacket on July 18, 2007, which sparked a multi-day news
story about Clinton’s cleavage. When Elizabeth Dole ran for president in 2000,
newspapers gave her less coverage on the issues and more on personal traits
than they did the men running for the Republican nomination, and even in their
focus on her personal traits, newspapers paid more attention to her appearance,