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The current study examines how distant outgroups are portrayed in humanitarian appeals on a popular social media platform, YouTube. Social media is a growing platform for humanitarian organisations to spread messages about crises, as they can reach a wide audience in a quick and costless manner. Drawing from theories of visual framing and intergroup relations, this study analyses how organisations frame the outgroup beneficiaries in their online donation appeals. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to explore online humanitarian donation appeals, with a focus on the visual content used to portray outgroup beneficiaries. The study sampled 187 videos from 10 prominent humanitarian organisations’ YouTube channels. Findings indicate that while humanitarian organisations have largely moved away from an explicit rhetoric of frail, dying, and suffering subjects, subtle notions of helplessness are still prevalent. The narrative that outgroup beneficiaries are passive sufferers can hence be detrimental to intergroup relations. Submitted/Accepted version

Intergroup contact varies in richness of the experience, yet the effect of contact richness has not been systematically examined. This paper experimentally tested whether and how different levels of mediated contact richness—afforded by different forms of media—affect attitudes toward marginalized outgroups (e.g., refugees, migrant workers). Data collected online from an adult sample (N = 510) found that richness of the mediated contact experience increased feelings of psychological closeness of the depicted outgroup member, which then reduced intergroup anxiety and perceived threat of the outgroup. This, in turn, increased support for policies that promote more humane and equitable conditions for the two outgroups. Theoretical implications for intergroup contact theory and practical implications for utilizing media programs to reduce intergroup bias are discussed. Ministry of Education (MOE) This work was partially supported by the Start-up Grant and Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant awarded to the first author.

As both news and audiences are increasingly mobile, this introduction calls for intensified research into mobility as a core characteristic of journalism. This special issue explores the intersection of news with mobility in production, distribution and consumption. News has become mobile in a material sense as it is accessed on portable devices; and in a professional sense of being cut adrift from the business models which sustained it, challenged by peripheral actors and alternative news media, and embracing new technologies, new relationships with the audience and new political challenges to its status quo. One task is to adapt research techniques usually applied to fixed phenomena–or at least applied with the intention of fixing them–to something fluid. This is not impossible. All mobilities need an infrastructure on which to move, offering fixed points in a fluid world. Mobility offers critical questions of power and dominance of who is mobile, how, and under what circumstances; in this way, mobility becomes embodied. And the paradigm calls for research into the mobility of journalism and its interaction with similarly fluid, related actualities: blogs, smartphones, audiences, economics, advertisers, government and technology. Each interacts with journalism to deliver diverse realities.

We bridge the theorizing on mediated and imagined contact and integrate these two contact forms in one sequence within a single design. We experimentally examine whether (1) encouraging people to i...