#American*

As the daughter of immigrants, Angie Chuang saw how you could have it all and still not belong. Her father—a civil engineer—never felt truly included in this country, a struggle Chuang frequently reflected on, even as her own career has taken off.

“My father was an American success story—a civil engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab,” said Chuang, an associate professor of journalism. “But seeing his struggles as I grew up made me profoundly aware of what it meant to be American with an asterisk.”

Her personal and professional experience—including covering race and ethnic issues at The Oregonian and developing curricula around related topics at both American University and CMDI—has given her a unique perspective when it comes to the news media’s struggles in reporting on race. It’s a topic she explores thoroughly in a new book, American Otherness in Journalism: News Media Representations of Identity and Belonging.

The book would have been published years ago, but as she was completing her first draft in 2016, Donald Trump was riding a wave of white nationalism to the White House, requiring 
important revisions.

“I didn’t feel it would be principled, as a researcher, to not consider the radical shift in thinking he represented,” she said.

In its new iteration, half the book investigates how news media has historically represented people, while the second half looks at how the president has dominated that narrative, in many ways narrowing the definition of “American.”

It’s not a new problem—Chuang covers examples like the infamous “American beats out Kwan” headline from the 1990s and coverage of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho—but Trump’s rhetoric intrigued her 
as a researcher, because while he was clearly talking about race, he rarely used traditional code words.

For example, early reports after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally used phrases like “alt-right,” “pro-white” and, sparingly, “white nationalism” because those were the terms those individuals used to describe themselves. When pressed, Trump referred to them as “very fine people.”

“Journalism’s fundamental flaw is that ‘objective journalism’ has taught people to get their sources’ perspectives and reproduce them in an unbiased, unfiltered way so the reader can decide,” Chuang said. “What we’ve learned is that there hasn’t been equal access granted to who gets to say their unfiltered version of events to the press.”

But she has hope. Thanks in part to public pushback challenging the “objective” earlier reporting, The Associated Press has directed journalists to use more definitive terms like “white supremacist” and even “racist.”

And as younger, diverse reporters emerge in the media landscape, bringing journalism to new places—like TikTok and Substack—Chuang sees the opportunity to make journalism better and more accessible by reflecting the stories and concerns of diverse communities.

“I don’t think we have to be precious about the word ‘journalism.’ And journalism does check itself; it’s not a monolith,” she said. “I’m interested in journalism having these debates and trying to do better, even in the face of attacks from the federal government. Journalism scholars and industry leaders need to continually push and advocate for free speech and responsible reporting.”