The news media played a fundamental role during the Rwandan genocide, both locally in Rwanda where hate propaganda fueled the killings, and internationally where the media are perceived to have fatally misinterpreted and even ignored the events. Criticism of the international media has been harsh and uncompromising, especially pertaining to the non-effect that the coverage is said to have had since that is linked to the international community's inaction. This view implies that a more accurate way of conveying news and information could have prevented the genocide as, supposedly, it would have created outbursts of moral indignation among the public and those in power and, ultimately, a more forceful intervention. This ideal conception represents the essence of much of the research carried out on the media's role in the Rwandan genocide.

In One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide, political scientist Jared A. Cohen chronicles US foreign policy in relation to the genocide and how non-intervention was justified within the American bureaucracy. Media is heavily blamed for not putting any significant pressure on the government, and when the genocide finally made the news the focus was on “the bodies and the horror, rather than on the details of the conflict,” according to Cohen. Instead, the high-speed pursuit and arrest of footballer and actor O. J. Simpson easily overshadowed the genocide for weeks in American news reporting during June 1994.

Spanish NGO and journalist Virginia de la Guardia blames the few news corporations, claiming that the fierce competition, coupled with new digital technologies, endangers serous reporting because it leads to a search for the most dramatic story, which essentially flares up and then quickly fades away without any follow-up. The rivalry also means that the media focus can only be on one world crisis at a time. This conspicuous concentration of news organizations “means that cost, objectivity and private and public sources are much more inter-linked than ever before,” and that the globalization of the media in fact has led to a concentration on cheaper local news items, such as crime in the US, where reporting on crime has gone up 600 percent, at the expense of foreign news.