This article argues that historical frames we often find in news media discourse can skew the way we perceive distant wars, and that this can have a knock-on effect on international humanitarian response within a cosmopolitan framework of global justice. Drawing on an empirical exploration of recent "humanitarian interventions" in Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda, the article shows how historical frames largely reinforced the elite-dominated news frames of "their crisis", and "not ours", which explains the delayed international intervention to end it. I conclude that the non-intervention, or delayed intervention, of the international community on humanitarian grounds to end these crises was informed more by historical empathy/distance frames than empathy/critical frames in the mainstream Western news media discourse. (Contains 21 notes.)