The creation of a transnational historical media memory of the Rwandan Genocide is based on the television news reporting during the genocide in 1994, but as was shown in the previous chapter there was no distinct narrative storyline between the start and the end of the genocide. Due to the inherent “liveness” of television news, a multitude of stories emerged, disappeared, and intertwined. Sometimes these stories contradicted each other, and nearly always these stories were constructed and explained from a Eurocentric perspective. How is it then possible to fit all these stories within one single media memory that a feature film or a documentary film can recreate? Is it even meaningful to talk about the Rwandan genocide as a single media memory or should we use the plural term, media memories, to better grasp the creation of a transnational historical media memory?

American historian of ideas Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows that collective memory—memories that are shared by groups rather than individuals, even on a global level—have undergone great changes due to the impact of modern mass media; especially pertaining to memories produced by film and television. While cinematic history has the capacity to simulate direct experience this process also limits or even muddles the connection to a historical past. Barash emphasizes that mass media select, articulate, and broadcast certain events and thus bestow them with public significance. However, the representation of communicated events are not just facsimiles of the past nor the present but are always charged with an autonomous symbolic sense (e.g., Eurocentric, colonial) through which public awareness is channeled and sedimented into a collective memory. While this autonomous symbolic sense can simulate direct experience, it also tends to suppress most of what is not deemed as customary or normal.

To talk about one transnational historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide is therefore both straightforward and misleading because the creation of this media memory is doubtlessly shaped by an autonomous symbolic sense based on a Eurocentric worldview consisting of a guilty Western conscience, ethnic amnesia, and ignorance—and the last criterion especially opens for a historiography that does not at all lead to a single historical media memory.