Many unacceptable situations and acts require a stressor. Stressors are situations and/or events that lead to a catastrophic outcome, such as the genocide in Rwanda. The tension between the Hutu and the Tutsi already existed; all it took was one thing to reach his breaking point: a stressor. On April 6, 1994, the plane occupying Juvénal Habyarimana, president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamina, president of Burundi, crashed for unexplained reasons. In the three months following the accident involving the two presidents in Rwanda, massacres began to occur. The death toll increased dramatically, leaving one million Rwandans dead and two million seeking refugee status among its neighbors: Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi (Kellow and Steeves 1998). This stressor is a key contributor to the events that followed; the Rwandan genocide. “The rise in tensions and violence, the widespread distribution of weapons to civilians and militias, and the increasingly vehement anti-Tutsi propaganda broadcast by Radio Libre des Mille Collines, all indicated the growing power of the ethnic hatred” (Uvin 1998, 83-84). ). Ethnic hatred centered on hostility and segregation towards a particular group, in this case the Tutsis. The use of fear, rumor and panic allowed the unstable decline of trust between Hutu and Tutsi, which eventually degenerated into outright ethnic hatred (Kellow and Steeves, 1998; Straus, 2007; Uvin, 1998). . The role of the media in the Rwandan genocide contributed to increasing violence and hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi inhabitants. One of the ways to get information easily accessible throughout Rwanda was through public broadcasting, particularly radio. Through broadcasting, it allowed the public... middle of newspaper ...... Rwanda before RTLM took control of its frequency at the start of the genocide (Thompson 2007, 390). Once again, the media is not the cause of genocide but rather a tool used to spread its devastation on a nation at a rapid pace. Works Cited Kellow, Christine L and H. Leslie Steeves. “The role of radio in the Rwandan genocide”. Journal of Communication, 1998: 107-128. Li, Darryl. “Echoes of violence: reflection on radio and the genocide in Rwanda.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2004: 9-27. Straus, Scott. “What is the relationship between hate radio and violence? Rethinking Rwanda’s “Radio Machete”.” Politics and Society, 2007: 609-637. Thompson, Allan. The media and the genocide in Rwanda. London: Pluto Press, 2007. Uvin, Peter. Aiding violence: the development enterprise in Rwanda. Connecticut: KumarianPress, Inc.., 1998.