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.
This study aims to provide an updated, comprehensive and systematic national image scale in a context where the ways states behave and the criteria people use to evaluate foreign nations may have transformed. By integrating concepts and measurements from various social science fields, including international relations, political psychology and communication, we developed a multidimensional conceptual framework and operationalisation of national image, consisting of three dimensions: nation, structural relations and emotion. Taking China's national image as a case study and conducting large-scale cross-national surveys ( N = 3, 600), our findings demonstrated that the normative sub-dimension of a nation and three components of the emotion dimension have universally influenced the foreign public attitudes towards China. Meanwhile, the impact of the structural relations dimensions on national image is highly context-dependent. Finally, the policy implications are discussed.
This article examines how Kazakh-, Russian-, Turkish-, and English-language news media framed migration from Russia to Kazakhstan after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russia's September 2022 mobilization. A qualitative comparative framing analysis of 26 news texts published from September 2022 to February 2026 identifies five linked frames: urban economic pressure; entrepreneurial and labor opportunity; legal-economic incorporation; social stratification; and adaptation, settlement, or return. The analysis situates these representations within Kazakhstan's long border and dense political, economic, and linguistic ties with Russia, while distinguishing border entries from durable settlement. It finds that apparently neutral socioeconomic reporting can both register local resentment and depoliticize it: migrants become conditionally legitimate when represented as skilled, solvent, documented, and incorporable, yet disruptive when associated with housing inflation and unequal access. The study shows how multilingual news publics construct divergent hierarchies of burden, usefulness, and belonging around the same migration episode.
As forcibly displaced people become increasingly marginalized, international refugee organizations create humanitarian communication to shape public opinions. Prior research has mainly examined how forcibly displaced people are represented in humanitarian communication, largely neglecting who and what are portrayed. This study examines who and what are (not) represented in the public communication of three major international refugee organizations regarding the Syrian and Central African crises (2015–2018). Drawing on a quantitative content analysis of 1244 press releases and news stories, we identified both hegemonic and partial counter-hegemonic humanitarian representations. The organizations predominantly covered the Syrian crisis, while forcibly displaced people and refugee organizations were the dominant sources, refining earlier studies. The former are represented in conventionalized, sociodemographically skewed ways. This study advances debates on hierarchies of suffering, demonstrating that humanitarian communication reproduces those not only through representational discourses but also through patterns of selection, (in)visibility and perceived deservingness, across and within crises.
This study examines how the journalism fields in Kenya and the United States constructed narratives of the 2013 Westgate Mall attack through their news-sourcing practices. Drawing on field theory and j. Siguru Wahutu’s concepts of national and cosmopolitan subfields, the study analyzes how patterns of source selection reflected different journalistic orientations and relationships to the event. A content analysis of 233 articles from leading Kenyan and US news organizations reveals both convergence and divergence in source selection. The Kenyan journalism field relied overwhelmingly on domestic sources (84%), combining state officials (65%) with substantial victim testimony (30%) to frame terrorism as both a security crisis and a collective tragedy. In contrast, the US journalism field prioritized US officials (55%) and experts (20%), while citing Kenyan sources primarily in official roles (40%) that supported the broader “War on Terror” narrative. Despite these differences, both fields ultimately reinforced state-centered interpretations by marginalizing non-elite perspectives and creating a “hierarchy of voice” that sustains dominant war on terror narratives.
