Allan Thompson, a journalism professor at Carleton, will hold the Ottawa launch for his new edited volume from CIGI Press: Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond, at the Rideau Club, 99 Bank St., on Wednesday, May 1, beginning at 5:30 p.m.

It has been 25 years since Rwanda slid into the abyss. The killings happened in broad daylight, yet many of us failed to grasp the unfolding events. When human beings are at their worst — as they most certainly were in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide — the world needs the institutions of journalism and the media to be at their best. Sadly, in Rwanda, the media fell short.

Confronted by Rwanda’s horrors, international news media at times turned away, or muddled the story when they did pay attention by casting it in a formulaic way as anarchic tribal warfare rather than an organized genocide. Hate media outlets in Rwanda played a role in laying the groundwork for genocide, and then encouraged the extermination campaign.

The lessons of Rwanda, in some respects a textbook case, should have been clear. But a quarter century later, these are lessons that we still struggle to absorb.

The global media landscape has been transformed since the 1994 Rwanda genocide. We are now saturated with social media, frequently generated by non-journalists. Mobile phones are everywhere. And in many quarters, the traditional news media business model continues to founder. Against that backdrop, it is more important than ever to examine the nexus between the media and the forces that give rise to mass atrocity.

Allan Thompson, editor of Media and Mass Atrocity, will be joined by two other contributors to the volume at the Rideau Club event, Nadia Hai, a Ph.D. candidate in communications at Carleton, and Stephanie MacLellan, a Senior Research Associate at CIGI, in Waterloo.

The event is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required as space is limited. https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/ottawa-launch-of-media-and-mass-atrocity-registration-60062401259