As data journalism has proliferated, audiences increasingly encounter objects such as charts and graphs in media. These outputs are often used in fact-checking settings to correct false beliefs. Yet they also involve presentational choices made by designers and editors. Broader interest in “telling stories with data” suggests that visualizations may change viewers’ perceptions and attitudes beyond belief accuracy. But is this the case for information that is topical and timely—in other words, when data journalistic outputs might be especially desirable? I address this question by means of a pre-registered conjoint experiment containing data visualizations about the scale and geographic composition of refugees entering the UK between 2001-20. These treatments, created by a professional visualizer to enhance external validity, randomly varied along four dimensions within designers’ abilities to change: chart type, dominant color, editorial framing, and labelling the data source. I fielded the experiment to a nationally-representative British sample (N=3,082) in August 2021 during the initial Afghan humanitarian crisis. Although exploratory analysis shows humanitarian framing led to more positive views of the government’s handling of refugee issues compared to the mean, the pre-registered hypotheses focusing on differences among design choices revealed mainly null results. This suggests specific visualization designs’ efficacy on salient topics may either depend on audience characteristics (which I also measured) or are perhaps more limited than commonly believed.