Previous research showed that differences in people’s motivations and opportunities to consume political information can widen knowledge divides within a country (Prior, 2007). However, little attention has been devoted to investigating how citizens’ interactions with their media environments explain political learning gaps across countries. We conduct a cross-national survey in five countries (Denmark, Poland, Italy, US and Switzerland) tapping respondents’ use of different news brands and platforms, and their knowledge of international and national news (N=3920). Our analyses reveal that i) the number of news outlets citizens use is positively linked to their levels of political knowledge, and ii) people need a greater number of news sources in more polarized than in less polarized-fragmented information landscapes to reach similar levels of political knowledge. Accordingly, we also find that the sources citizens use in more polarized settings tend to be more opinion-congruent and are perceived as of lower quality and more biased. Taken together, these findings speak to individuals’ coping strategies to acquire political information in different information environments, and explain why people in more polarized-fragmented landscapes tend to compensate for the (actual and perceived) shortcomings of their media contexts by using more news sources. Overall, our study sheds light on individual and contextual antecedents of political knowledge gaps and adds to our understanding of how more partisan and commercialized media environments can set higher barriers to information acquisition.