Better Than Fiction

I love the west wing. Come January I am pretty sure I will love it literally, but before November 4th, when the main inhabitant of the west wing was unsavory, and the fate of its future inhabitant hung in the balance, the fictional west wing was a nice alternative to love. In the fictional west wing the president made wise decisions, based on a firm commitment to do right by his people. The white house staff was intelligent and informed. Aids to the president, while not always right, were unabashedly honest and unfailingly moral. Ignorance was unacceptable and ignoramuses were lectured well and promptly dismissed. It was American politics as they should be.

And it was fake. It was a warped version of reality, a rose-tinted glasses view of American government and the status quo. It imagined a white house where an inexperienced, minority candidate could beat out a highly experienced, highly respected Washington insider. Then, two years later, after the show had long gone, the fairy tale story came true. It is no longer confined to the silver screen, it is our reality.

I posted the video to illustrate the similarities between the television candidate and the actual one. Below there is a link to an imagined meeting between Jed Bartlett, the president on the West Wing, and President-Elect Obama.

What the whole thing got me thinking about is Gerbner's cultivation theory, and Media Framing and structure versus content. Cultivation theory argued that people who watched large amounts of television began to perceive reality as similar to the world of television, even though it was drastically different. The perceived reality tended to be much more negative the the actual reality. In this case though, the world of television was light years ahead of our world. The content of the West Wing was different than the standard content, different than the norm. Television adopted minority Presidents far sooner than reality did. The television series "24" featured an African-American president, and the West Wing's Mark Santos is Hispanic.

Obviously Obama won based on his own merits and not based on some subtle hinting from a television show two years gone, but it does add another story to the question of media influence, particularly that of televised drama's. Their content does not ubiquitously follow the line of least resistance, the line of how it always has been. Some times they challenge people and their understandings for the better.

New York Times Opinion Article Link:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DE2D61E30F932A1575AC0A96E9C8B63&scp=2&sq=Maureen+Dowd%2C+West+Wing&st=nyt#