"The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate how UK television shapes spectators’ experiences of distant Others. Specifically, I aim to build on and extend existing work in this field, and particularly the work of Lilie Chouliaraki in Spectatorship of Suffering, in three directions. Firstly, I argue that we can learn more about how spectators of UK television respond to distant Others if we expand our focus beyond ‘peak moments’ of news coverage of suffering to include a focus on routine coverage of all distant Others, suffering or otherwise, across a range of television genres. Secondly, I contend that it is important to preface investigations into how distant Others are mediated by television with a study of the extent to which people from Other countries even appear on UK television. Thirdly, I argue that in order to take seriously an understanding of mediation as a dialectical process, any analysis of media texts should be complemented by audience research that takes time to listen to the accounts of spectators. The results of a series of content analyses reveal that distant Others seldom appear on UK television, particularly those from certain parts of the world. My application of a modified version of Chouliraki’s analytics of mediation and the results of a series of focus groups and a diary study reveal that television news texts routinely offer spectators a position of indifference with respect to distant and dehumanised distant Others. My results also show that non-news factual television programming has greater capacity than news items for appealing to a more intense mediated experience of distant Others, even if this capacity is often not fully realised. I conclude by arguing that these findings have important implications for broadcasters, producers, policy makers, regulators and academics." (Abstract)