From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. On Wednesday, two Rwandan journalists were sentenced to life imprisonment by a UN war crimes tribunal convened in

neighboring Tanzania. Ferdinand Nahimana and Hassan Ingezi had been convicted of inciting

genocide in the 1994 Rwandan bloodbath that killed 800,000 minority Tutsis.

Nahimana's broadcasts targeted specific victims,

and Ingesi's newspaper promulgated a Hutu Ten Commandments

inciting murder of civilians.

They were found to have used the media as a machete.

The first such verdict since the 1946 Nuremberg trial of Nazi propagandist,

Julius Stryker. Stephen Rapp was a prosecutor in the Rwanda case, and he joins me now from

Arusha Tanzania. Stephen, welcome back to O'TM. Good to be on. Tell me about this verdict.

What is its significance? Well, it was an absolutely groundbreaking

verdict. It's really the first time that the media, and specifically the people who control

it, were held responsible for their broadcast as the crimes that constituted to genocide

and direct public incitement to genocide.

What was the defense?

The defense initially was, you know, that these were political organs that were stating their views.

There was an invasion going on and they were denouncing that enemy that was threatening

what they viewed as democracy in the country,

and that these things never really had any causal connection to any killings.

Now, eventually, during the course of the case, we very solidly showed that there was a very direct causal connection,

that the killers were directed to specific places of refuge,

...