Radio Machete
Ah, and just when I was talking about Rwanda, here is this story. How very interesting. The first time media executives have been convicted since the Nurenberg trials. Well that’s too bad, for a start, because Serbian radio was also used to whip up murderous ethnic hatreds. But it’s better than nothing.
In the first verdict of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court today convicted three Rwandan news media executives of genocide for helping to incite a killing spree by machete-wielding gangs who slaughtered about 800,000 Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda in early 1994. A three judge panel found that the three defendants used a radio station and a twice-monthly newspaper to inflame ethnic hatred that eventually led to massacres at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks. The radio station, dubbed Radio Machete in Rwanda, guided killers to specific victims, broadcasting the names, license plate numbers and hiding places of Tutsis.
This is the kind of thing I always wonder about when free speech absolutists get wound up.
“The power of the media to create and destroy human values comes with great responsibility,” the court said in a 29-page summary of its judgment. “Those who control the media are accountable for its consequences.”…John Floyd, who defended one of the executives, a newspaper editor named Hassan Ngeze, denounced the verdict as a major setback for free speech and an invitation to dictators to close down any media outlet that is out of favor. “This is a terrible, terrible decision, the worst decision in the history of international justice,” Mr. Floyd said. “This is very, very dangerous. This case would have been laughed out of an American court.”
Would it? I hope not, but maybe it would. Fortunately we haven’t (as far as I know) had a situation like that, but if we did, would judges laugh a prosecution of such media executives out of court? US courts do protect political bribery and various kinds of advertising as free speech in the US, no matter how corrupt and harmful they may be, so…who knows.
Mr. Floyd’s claims that these cases would be laughed out of an American court are dubious. Requesting or soliciting the murder(s) of an individual(s), such as it occurred in Rwanda, is illegal in all 50 States. If I as an individual made such requests in the manner that these radio stations did, there is not a DA in anywhere in the states who would not quickly charge me with conspiracy to murder. If I made these requests over the radio, I’d be similarly charged. The fact that these requests were “broadcast” does not somehow magically protect them under any “freedom of speech.” What occurred in Rwanda went far beyond any protected speech. There is no similarity between an American rapper’s call for his home boys to put a cap in the ass of a police officer, or the tobacco industries pleas for me to smoke their products (as distasteful or disturbing or harm causing as these “free-speech statements” may be) and telling your listening audience to go down to 500 State Street and chop of the heads of Mr. Smith and his family. Mr. Floyd is grasping at straws here, and I can only take his statements to be the posturing of a desperate defense attorney who has no other ways of defending his client.
Yes, good point, I meant to say that in the Comment, actually, and forgot – that defense lawyers do say things like that, and that they’re not necessarily true.
On the other hand – I would disagree that there is *no* similarity between explicit calls for murder and, for instance, tobacco companies’ advertising their products. I think there is in fact quite a lot of similarity, and tobacco advertising of any kind whatever has long seemed to me a truly anomalous and bizarre institution. People aren’t allowed to make advertisements urging people to drink cyanide (at least I don’t think they are), so why tobacco is different is simply beyond me. I suppose the reason is that the evidence of how toxic and addictive tobacco is came well after the custom of advertising it was established, and established customs are hard to get rid of. Other than that, I can’t see any justification.