American Otherness in Journalism

Winner of the 2026 Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award

Offering a critical insight into the production, gatekeeping, and consumption of news in contemporary American society, American Otherness in Journalism lays bare embedded cultural beliefs, via mainstream news media, to ask: who gets to be represented as American, and why?

In this book Angie Chuang argues that, ever since the early 20th century, when the idea of “The (Racial) Melting Pot” became popularized, the dominant-culture conceptualization of American identity is such that some residents have always been perceived as more American than others. Combining close textual analysis of high-profile case studies with media theories of false balance, stereotypical selection, default Whiteness, and the protest paradigm, Chuang demonstrates how news media practices have created a cultural context that excludes some Americans from fully belonging to American identity. The nine news media case studies in American Otherness in Journalism span the first two decades of this century, bracketed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives include news coverage of the undocumented, mostly-Latine, youth pursuing residency through the DREAM Act/DACA, the Barack Obama “birther” debate, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the Atlanta spa shootings, and Breonna Taylor’s killing prior to the 2020 summer of protest. Showing how longstanding multicultural ideals about Americanness and racial equity were exposed, dismantled, and re-examined in the news during this period, this critical study provides a new analytical vocabulary with which to understand vital and difficult issues of Self and Other in our time.

An essential read for students, practitioners, and scholars of race reporting in the U.S. context, this book will be of interest to anyone studying or researching issues of diversity in the media.