Journalism as Genocide
▻http://www.thepolisproject.com/journalism-as-genocide
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Rwandan cultural anthropologist Charles Mironko analyzed confessions of a hundred genocide perpetrators. His work confirms the thesis that hate messages in the media had a direct effect on the dehumanization of the population that was subject to persistent slander. Several months of this behavior, in the absence of credible reporting, conditioned the population to hate, and kill.
Similarly, the tribunal held that the media – both newspaper and radio – “relentlessly, targeted the Tutsi population for destruction” and portrayed them as a “political threat”. The hate media essentially became the background score to the state’s dispensation of arbitrary authority, and the journalist became both the petty sovereign of the state and useful idiots. In this, it used a line of reasoning similar to the Streicher case at Nuremberg, where Der Stürmer, a weekly tabloid-format Nazi newspaper, was found to have “injected into the minds of thousands of Germans a poison that caused them to support the National Socialist policy of Jewish persecution and extermination”.
Der Stürmer, like Kangura, its Rwandan equivalent, was filled with stories of slander, libel, smear campaigns, and fabricated stories. By journalistic standards, both publications were nothing more than substandard tabloids. Yet, they enjoyed enormous influence and support from leading public figures in various fields, political elites and other popular journalists. Both cultivated powerful patrons and molded their audience into a controllable, incitable mob of puppets.
