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Abstract
Over the latest decade, the availability of news media from various countries of the globe has increased dramatically as both media production and consumption have been steered towards digital and social platforms. This de-territorialized news ecology has been widely researched in terms of content and distribution, while its broader consequences for news audiences have been less studied. Focusing on the case of Sweden, this article analyses social variations in transnational news consumption including platform selections, motivations, and attitudes connected to this news use. Results show that transnational news consumption is more widespread among people with a background in other countries than Sweden, but all together, more than a quarter of the Swedish population and nearly half of the younger generation are weekly consumers of news from other countries. Hence, transnational news consumption is no longer restricted to a specific elite-segment of society, which has been a common argument in scholarly debates around the globalization of news. Another central finding is that transnational news consumption is rooted in a willingness to understand the outside world through alternative perspectives, rather than in a dissatisfaction with the quality or trustworthiness of the news produced by Swedish outlets.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Many thanks to Ester Appelgren and Gunnar Nygren at Södertörn University for constructive comments on previous versions of this article.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The truth about refugees in Sweden: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/02/24/the-truth-about-refugees-in-sweden/?utm_term=.4e7fa5a3b19d.
3. The tweet was formulated as follows: “My statement as to what’s happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants & Sweden.” Tweet is available on Donald Trump’s Twitter account (accessed on December 12, 2017): https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/833435244451753984.
4. Quote from Sweden’s largest online newspaper Aftonbladet: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/g26Lk/after-trumps-last-night-in-sweden-here-are-the-errors-in-fox-news. Several of the English texts published during this period were among the most widely shared in social media in Sweden at the time. One of them published in Sweden’s largest daily, Dagens Nyheter, generated over 400,000 unique visitors alone in the same period.
5. Translation from Swedish by the author.