A review by margaretefg
Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship by Anjan Sundaram

3.0

Sundaram describes the program he ran for journalists in Kigali, and over the course of the book, the program gradually becomes less and less effective. Journalists are afraid to report, those who even seem to hint at criticism of the government are harassed, jailed, threatened and their families and neighbors reject them. This is a completely different image of Paul Kagame than the one that comes through in Gourevitch's We wish to inform you. Sundaram's metaphor for how to see the repression in Rwanda is to look at what's missing, but it's perhaps a testament to how successful the repression is that even while reading I wondered about the conclusions he was drawing...how could this be true? He paints a picture of a society steadily moving towards a single voice, the voice of the government, even to the extent that people betray loved ones or take actions that hurt themselves.