From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

In Arusha, Tanzania, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is prosecuting those accused of responsibility for the genocide of the Tutsi

minority in 1994. One of the cases currently before the court has come to be known as the

media trial. Three men connected with newspaper and radio representing the Hutu power

movement are charged with conspiracy to genocide. There are very few precedents in international

law, the principal one being the judgment against Der Stürmer editor Julius Stryker at

Nuremberg. Stephen Rapp is a former U.S. District Attorney and the lead prosecutor in the Rwanda

case. He insists that the genocide was made possible by the hatred generated by the

newspaper Kangora and coordinated by the Kagali radio station, RTLM.

In Rwanda, during the genocide, there were literally thousands of roadblocks every few hundred

meters.

And at every roadblock, according to witnesses.

There was an FM radio, and that radio station would be egging people on, urging them to get rid of the Inyense, the so-called cockroaches in the Kiwanda language. Well, specifically, what did they do?

There are plenty of examples of hateful media that doesn't actually amount to genocide.

How did they cross that line?

Well, when they would name names of traitors and accomplices that were living in particular

neighborhoods and essentially urged them to be killed, and within minutes, killing militias would arrive and kill them when they would read out

the license numbers of people that were attempting to flee.

And when those people would be stopped and murdered, they would say several thousand

RPF enemy soldiers are in refuge at this moment at the Gaddafi mosque in Kigali,

...