In its 2003 verdict, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found Rwandan journalists Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza guilty of genocide, incitement to genocide, conspiracy, and crimes against humanity. The case against Nahimana and Barayagwiza raised important questions regarding the role of the media and their social accountability. For the first time since the Nuremberg trials, hate speech was prosecuted as a war crime. The judgment declared that the way the journalists had acted constituted “journalism as genocide”. Words can kill 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…

---