About 80 people, including GW students, attended a panel discussion Thursday in the World Bank InfoShop about the role of the media in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The audience, which consisted of World Bank employees and journalists in addition to the students, came to hear from the editor and three contributors to the book "The Media and the Rwandan Genocide," released last week. There were also 10 people who watched from the World Bank offices in Kigali, Rwanda via video conferencing.
Allan Thompson, the editor of "The Media and the Rwandan Genocide" and contributing authors Steven Livingston and Mark Frohardt all spoke about how Western media coverage affected foreign response to the genocide.
"The international media failed to cover the Rwandan genocide in 1994," said Thompson, a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Can., who worked for the daily newspaper The Toronto Star in 1994. He added that he would have been interested in covering the story if he had known.
"In 1994, working for The Toronto Star, I was oblivious to the events going on in Rwanda," he said. "Now I wonder how I missed this story."
Thompson showed the audience at the World Bank a clip of the movie "Hotel Rwanda," which he said is what most Western cultures understand as the Rwandan genocide. Thompson also showed cameraman Nick Hughes' footage from Rwanda, on which scenes in "Hotel Rwanda" were based, as a comparison to the movie's less graphic rendition.
The video clips show a calm systematic killing procedure Thompson described as similar to a "roadside work crew" rather than the "rampaging ethnic groups" the media reported.
A contributing author who was in Rwanda studying American news media coverage of the genocide in 1994, Steven Livingston, described the process by which journalists in Africa decided which images to send back for the Western news media. Less intimate shots were the norm, said the School of Media and Public Affairs associate professor.
The audience, which consisted of World Bank employees and journalists in addition to the students, came to hear from the editor and three contributors to the book "The Media and the Rwandan Genocide," released last week. There were also 10 people who watched from the World Bank offices in Kigali, Rwanda via video conferencing.
Allan Thompson, the editor of "The Media and the Rwandan Genocide" and contributing authors Steven Livingston and Mark Frohardt all spoke about how Western media coverage affected foreign response to the genocide.
"The international media failed to cover the Rwandan genocide in 1994," said Thompson, a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Can., who worked for the daily newspaper The Toronto Star in 1994. He added that he would have been interested in covering the story if he had known.
"In 1994, working for The Toronto Star, I was oblivious to the events going on in Rwanda," he said. "Now I wonder how I missed this story."
Thompson showed the audience at the World Bank a clip of the movie "Hotel Rwanda," which he said is what most Western cultures understand as the Rwandan genocide. Thompson also showed cameraman Nick Hughes' footage from Rwanda, on which scenes in "Hotel Rwanda" were based, as a comparison to the movie's less graphic rendition.
The video clips show a calm systematic killing procedure Thompson described as similar to a "roadside work crew" rather than the "rampaging ethnic groups" the media reported.
A contributing author who was in Rwanda studying American news media coverage of the genocide in 1994, Steven Livingston, described the process by which journalists in Africa decided which images to send back for the Western news media. Less intimate shots were the norm, said the School of Media and Public Affairs associate professor.
