research

Publications

(8) Du, Ke, and Zhe Xu. “Trust in news media across Asia: A multilevel analysis of individual and societal factors.” Journalism and Media 7.1 (2026): 8.

(7) Xu, Zhe, and Mengrong Zhang. “How news media visually dehumanize victims of humanitarian crises through framing disparities: A quantitative comparative analysis.” International Communication Gazette 86.8 (2024): 633-654.

(6) Xu, Zhe. “Book review: Humanitarian journalists: Covering crises from a boundary zone.” European Journal of Communication 38.6 (2023): 637-639.

(5) Xu, Zhe. “Book review: Computing the news: Data journalism and the search for objectivity.” Journalism 24.11 (2023).

(4) Xu, Zhe, and Mengrong Zhang. “The politics of pity under authoritarianism.” International Journal of Communication 17 (2023): 19-19.

(3) Xu, Zhe. “Audiences of distant suffering in authoritarian regimes: Denial mechanisms and acts of moral justification.” Media, Culture & Society 45.5 (2023).

(2) Xu, Zhe, and Mengrong Zhang. “The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality.” The Communication Review 25.3-4 (2022): 181-203.

(1) Xu, Zhe. “Book review: Routledge handbook of humanitarian communication.” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 4.

Selected working papers

(3) Xu, Zhe, David Ongenaert, Shuai Wang, Canan Cetin, Mengrong Zhang, Michela Cimarelli, and David Luu. “Modeling Visual Framing of Humanitarian Emergency Appeals on Social Media Using Multimodal Large Language Models and Semantic Clustering.” Under review. (DFG-funded)

(2) Xu, Zhe, Martin Scott, Shuai Wang, Dani Madrid-Morales, and Kate Wright. “Journalistic roles in humanitarian news: A multistage natural language processing approach.” Under review. (DFG-funded)

(1) Xu, Zhe, Yotam Ophir, Ke Du, Gaia Guatri, Shuai Wang, Dani Madrid-Morales, and Kate Wright. “A longitudinal unsupervised machine learning analysis of refugee framing in humanitarian news.” Under review. (DFG-funded)