Humanities academics say American media have been hard on Gu because she chose to compete for China, whereas Kim was celebrated. Maybe. She'd have lost her passport if she had done it to the CCP. The authors suggest it is because Gu's father is white.
If you can help the dictatorship when more Olympic medals than democracies, you can be Chinese, according to communist thought. Science says otherwise.
To confirm their beliefs, they looked at 116 reports on Kim and 106 reports on Gu to show differences in how their identities were defined by the mainstream press. They argue that Kim, whose parents were both Korean but declined to compete for South Korea, got favorable treatment while Gu, whose mother was Chinese, was portrayed as a "nationalist threat", yet both were subject tot "conditional belonging."
So neither was really American.
In American media? Next to environmentalism and the federal government, the most left-wing group in the United States are journalists, yet they made being American for children of immigrants conditional on supporting the United States?
Not at all. Gu was instead revered by progressives, they called her competing for China an indictment of Trump, even though she joined China during the Biden administration. Any time someone doesn't compete for their home country and instead opts for another, there will be rationalization. If you can't compete on the swim team in the United States but can make the Olympic team for Dominican Republic, you'll get accused of cultural profiteering. You still get to say you are an Olympic athlete, and if media are so easily manipulated you can get your conditional belonging back by just waving a flag and saying something nice, right?
The authors are also critical of stories that noted their academic achievements, claiming that is the "model minority" narrative, but like Implicit Bias, it reads like a weapon being used everywhere for everywhere all at once. Why wouldn't journalists say 'they are great athletes, and also smart' for kids with an Asian parent just like they talk about the good academics of NFL football players. It would be more bizarre if they only focused on the physical and didn't mention they had done well at Princeton and Stanford.
The authors also say that Kim faced bullying during COVID-19, even though she is Korean, because the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic erupted in Wuhan, China. It could certainly have happened. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, assaults and intimidation of middle eastern people went up, even in the progressive San Francisco bay area. Except the middle eastern people were Jewish. They were blamed for Muslim terrorist attacks. People can be bizarre, so blaming an American whose parents moved here from Korea isn't special. France will treats grandchildren of immigrants far worse in culture, and they will likely never be citizens.
It's a very oddly constructed paper for a somewhat specious claim, and I realize that the authors will then dismiss me as creating an insider versus outsider binary about their work, and all the other postmodern mumbo-jumbo that gets invoked because they are not gushing about America.
The answer is more simple; Kim was celebrated in America because she won Gold medals for America. Yet that doesn't mean Gu is treated badly. She only won a Silver for China, yet was still featured on the Today show in America.
If that is bias, a lot of athletes for foreign countries would love to get some.
Citation: Yu, W., Park, D. J.,&Shin, N. (2026). Ungrateful Immigrant Vs. American Dream: Critical Discourse Analysis of U.S. Popular Press on the Nationality Choices of Eileen Gu and Chloe Kim. Communication & Sport. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21674795251411206
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