In need of transnational news literacies: What migrant audiences from an autocracy know about their news

Extant news-literacy research has focused mainly on democracies and nationwide populations. By contrast, we know little about migrants’ news literacy knowledge. To address this gap, we present a case study grounded in 42 semi-structured interviews with Russian speakers who migrated from authoritarian post-Soviet contexts to democratic Germany. The study describes a phenomenon we conceptualise as ‘transnational news literacy’, understood as the stocks of knowledge a group needs to critically evaluate information received across several news environments. The results illustrate how this knowledge differed significantly among interviewees in two major elements of news literacy: (1) the creation and (2) the context of news. When participants lacked knowledge of specific elements, they often relied on broadly available symbolic resources – conceptualised in the study as ‘folk theories’ – which they applied across both news environments. The paper also discusses the practical implications for news literacy programs developed for migrant audiences.