The Re-Celebrification of Malia Obama: Girlhood, Race, and Celebrity in News Coverage

Abstract During her years in the White House, media access to Malia Obama was carefully regulated by her parents, resulting in largely positive, one-dimensional news coverage. Critically analyzing news coverage of Malia Obama during her transition from first daughter to independent young woman college student in the post–White House years of 2016 to 2019, we identify two sets of competing media frames—celebrity girl versus ordinary girl and can-do girl versus Ophelia girl—that paradoxically constructed Malia during these years. We argue that, through these tensions, the press worked to challenge, even undermine, the high-achieving, successful Black girl narrative cultivated during the Obama White House years. The result is a re-celebrification and re-racialization of Malia that evidences a disturbingly regressive and almost structurally retributional tone that differs from coverage of recent White first daughters.