This chapter explores the rhetoric of compassion in media framings of humanitarian crises in a historical and cultural perspective across space and time. lt shows the first results of an exploratory analysis of media narratives and images of war between the 1960s and the 1990s. Benefiting from the cover of the mass media, modern humanitarianism has played a controversial role in raising public opinion and influencing politics and has contributed to the appearance of the 'victim' concept and its representation in the media throughout the twentieth century, along with images of pain and dea th. 'Victimization', or the tendency to induce a hierarchy among victims, offers an immediate reading of such humanitarian crises according to a simplified and Manichean scheme. But since media representations insist on producing figures of innocent suffering su ch as women and children, their narratives and images often fall back on older collective references and memories. Using 'framing mechanisms' as methodological tools, these results provide representations that favor Christian iconography and historical parallels such as World War II. These representations act às means of qualifying the crises and result ultimately in the moral condemnation of them. While there are clear distinctions in how conflicts are treated wh en they emerge in western as opposed to Third World countries, on how the ethnie victims' background is presented, and on how the paradigm of distance and proximity is dealt with, these media framings are all aimed at relieving suffering, are based on universally shared values, but are at the same time at risk of resorting to reductive schemes.