How the Newspapers El Pais, Le Monde, Le Soir and The New York Times Treated Information on the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994

The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 claimed the lives of 800 000 people. This occurred in the face of inactivity on the part of Western governments, which only acted at the beginning of the massacres to evacuate western citizens and failed to create a security zone until more than two months later. The article analyzes how the newspapers El Pais, Le Monde, Le Soir and The New York Times covered the genocide, so as to assess the relevance each newspaper afforded to the situation and to provide a rough idea of how they contributed to what people knew about it. The research is based on an analysis of quantitative content in which the coverage providing information on the genocide is compared to the press coverage of other international conflicts that were ongoing at the time, such as the situations in Bosnia, South Africa and the Middle East. The results show the Rwandan conflict occupied more space than all the other conflicts on the international scene at the time, and a correlation was found between the volume of information and the degree to which the respective countries were implicated in the conflict.