CNN turned 25 this month, and over the past week it has been throwing itself a party. Part of the celebration included a list of the top 25 defining moments of the cable network’s life, from the Challenger explosion to the recent tsunami.

Tucked away in this list, in between the 2000 Florida recount and the Gulf Wars (the first of which was inarguably CNN’s shining moment) are the “Genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia.”

It’s no shocker that coverage of the current and ongoing carnage in Sudan wasn’t included alongside Rwanda and Bosnia. But, since this list includes events as recent as last Christmas, it’s worth considering why it wasn’t.

The answer can be found by looking back at the CNN of 1994 — the one that covered the Rwandan genocide.

There have been critics of that coverage, and we’ll cite some, but there is no doubt at all that, whatever its shortcomings, the CNN of 1994 brought the genocide into the homes of millions of Americans. True, CNN, like most everybody else, paid little attention to the underlying tensions that erupted into full-scale war upon the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu leader President Habyarimanal, so its performance can only be measured in the stories it told, how often it told them, and from where they were told after the violence began.

A quick refresher: Between April 1994 and July 1994, nearly one million Tutsis perished as the result of an ethnic cleansing campaign by Hutus that transpired at a rate three times that of the Nazi killings during World War II. Beginning in April 1994, CNN received live reports from correspondent Gary Streiker as he made his way to Rwanda via Kenya, Burundi and Tanzania. At first, Streiker focused on the American angle — foreign nationals fleeing the violence heading out of Rwanda as he, Streiker, headed into it.

After the initial exodus, it would be nearly a month before Streiker would appear again, although CNN did update viewers several times per week as events unfolded. Steven Livingston, a professor at George Washington University who studied coverage of the Rwanda genocide, offered this critical assessment: “For American television, Rwanda wasn’t a story of genocide, Rwanda was a medical story. The lion’s share of coverage comes in July-August, not April, May. What’s [the story in] July-August, the refugee camps in Zaire. … That’s even more true of the presumably omnipotent CNN.” It’s true — the coverage did increase only well after the majority of the killings, and, as Livingston said, at that point the story was portrayed as a “medical” one.

But this assessment ignores the impact of Streiker’s earlier presence in Rwanda, where his camera crew was able to capture the horror of the genocide and beam it into living rooms across America. During a May 9, 1994 broadcast, the late CNN correspondent John Holliman emphasized the significance of the images: “As I read and watched the news coming from Haiti and Rwanda this week, I was struck not by individuals who made a difference in the countries, but by a haunting picture. CNN’s Gary Strieker used it in his report from Rwanda’s border with Tanzania. The rapidly moving water of the [Kagera] River, carrying with it hundreds of Rwandan bodies, slaughtered and dumped in the river, creating a picture not seen since the Nazi death camps of the 1940s. An image of almost unimaginable horror. Will the world react to these pictures and do anything?”

On many occasions between April and July, CNN warned its viewers that a “report contains pictures which may disturb some of our viewers” and then rolled footage from the war zone, making it impossible for Americans to ignore what was happening. When 20,000 Tutsis were massacred in a church in early June 1994, Streiker brought the story home and CNN rolled the footage, or, as Streiker put it, pictures that “only begin to describe the carnage.”

As Livingston observed, later in the summer the story became one of refugees in need of medical help. In this vein, Christine Amanpour joined the scene on June 26 and filed reports for the network — many from a refugee camp in Goma, Zaire — about victims, aid workers, and late-arriving international response.

While it might not have been perfect, CNN’s performance in 1994, in particular the use of images, far exceeds its skimpy coverage of the current conflict in Sudan. Simply put, if you watched CNN in the summer of 1994, you were made aware of a genocide taking place on a nationwide scale — and you were given a working understanding of what triggered it.

The same cannot be said for the network’s coverage of Sudan this year. These days there’s a lot of talk from anchors and guests about the pictures they see, but the network doesn’t actually have any footage. By CJR Daily’s count, the last time CNN showed pictures from Sudan was March 15. At the time, Wolf Blitzer told viewers, “The images in the piece we’re about to show you may be disturbing to some viewers.” Disturbing? Yes, but necessary to get across the fact that brutal slaughter occurs on a daily basis in Sudan.

In CNN’s defense, access to the war zone is off-limits to most reporters. New York Times columnist and genocide hawk Nicholas Kristof described the situation earlier this week: “The world might also respond if people could see what is going on, but Sudan has barred most reporters from the area. I’m here because I accompanied Kofi Annan on a visit — bless him for coming! — and then jumped ship while here.” Similarly, when CJR Daily interviewed the Washington Post’s Emily Wax in February, she told stories of waiting around for weeks for travel permits that were often rejected.

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