Studies of Orientalized portrayals of Muslims have generally been distinct from studies on the Othering of immigrant Americans. This study employs concepts of insider/outsider status, applying theories of Orientalism and representations of the Other to newspaper coverage of the Muslim and Pakistani American perpetrator of the 2010 attempted Times Square bombing. Newspapers constructed a seemingly contradictory representation of Faisal Shahzad, as the apparent insider/American who becomes the alienated outsider/Other. This portrayal of the Orientalized insider establishes an emerging discourse on the “homegrown” terrorist who exists at the boundary of self and Other.

Scholarship on media representations of Asian minority identity has established that historic constructions of the Other perpetuate a conflation of ethnic with foreign. Previous studies of Seung-Hui Cho and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings concluded that though Cho was a South Korean national, news media overemphasized his foreign identity, despite his living in the United States most of his life. This study examines newspaper coverage of the 2009 mass shooting at an immigrant-services center in Binghamton, New York, and of perpetrator Jiverly Wong, who immigrated from Vietnam, had lived in the United States for two decades, and was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

News-media research on coverage of Latino/Latinas has historically focused on negative stereotyping, particularly as threatening, criminal, lazy, or a burden on society. The 2010-2012 newspaper coverage of a proposed immigration policy commonly referred to as the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act provides a distinctive case study, one that addresses a subgroup of Latino/Latinas that inherently defies traditional stereotypes. A mixed-methods analysis of the use of exemplars in newspaper coverage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act reveals that an emphasis on signifiers of hard work, academic achievement, self-determination, and other traditionally 'American' cultural codes, juxtaposed with signifiers of poverty and financial need, constitutes a stereotypically selective 'success story'. Such semiotic codes construct the exemplars as a dependent target population that must assimilate American values in order to overcome the 'deficits' of being Latino/Latina and undocumented. News media, part of the dominant culture, become complicit in mediation of Americanness in its legal and symbolic senses.

U.S. news coverage of crime or terrorism perpetrators belonging to “Other” identity groups tends to focus on single, salient signifiers of race, religion, and immigration status. This mixed‐method data analysis of coverage of the 2002 DC sniper shooting spree in the Washington Post and Seattle Times presents a theoretical case study of multiple and layered Other identities. Signifiers of blackness, Muslim identity, immigrant identity, and veteran status were all present in newspaper portrayals of Muhammad and Malvo, and journalists appeared to vacillate between them. Thus, in the absence of a single, salient form of Other identity, the use of shifting signifiers reflected newspapers' confusion about Muhammad and Malvo's identity, as well as the uncategorizable nature of the crime itself.

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