http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A81506

The alleged U.S. collusion in the genocide of more than half a million Tutsi people by the Hutus in Rwanda. Corn noticed a modest news story in The New York Times which said that the Organization for African Unity had issued a report critical of the United States -- especially of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- for handling the Rwandan genocide so poorly. "But the story did not go into details," Corn wrote, "[even though] the report demolished the Clinton assertion that he had not been fully aware of the genocide when it had been under way." Ellen Ray's lengthy article about the Congo in Covert Action Quarterly echoed this condemning assertion.

Other mass killings have occurred during Rwanda's brutal history. However, under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, once a genocide is recognized, the nations of the world are obligated to prevent the killings and to punish the murderers. A story that strongly suggests that our government knew about this horrible rampage, and might have prevented it, deserves significant media followup.3. Army Propaganda Team Worked at CNN
Award to: Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch The corporate media has long relied on government spinmeisters to produce news during times of war. The army has entire units of men, called "psychological operations" groups, devoted in part to spreading information and propaganda to news organizations. From them, media outlets get insider, official information without having to do much reporting.

But the military took the principle way too far when it actually placed army psy-ops personnel at CNN's TV, radio, and satellite bureaus during the Kosovo war. Through a program called "Training With Industry," the army stationed five psy-ops soldiers as interns at CNN's Southeast bureau. Later, in a closed-door army symposium, a psy-ops commander said the cooperation with CNN was a textbook example of the kind of ties the American army wants to have with the media.

"The U.S. Army ... confirmed to me that military personnel have been involved in news production at CNN's newsdesks," said Abe De Vried, who first broke the story in a respected Dutch newspaper. "I found it simply astonishing. These kind of close ties with the army are, in my view, completely unacceptable for any serious news organization."

As award-winner Alexander Cockburn speculated, "It could be that CNN was the target of a psy-ops penetration and is still too naive to figure out what was going on."