The disturbing feature of many accounts, including those in the media, which explain post-Cold War conflicts in terms of genocide is that the quest for moral simplicity involves distortion. Many critics have suggested that a new model of 'ethnic' or 'tribal' conflict became dominant in the 1990s, a model which offered misleading explanations of why conflict had broken out in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and which apparently justified inaction rather than intervention. At least as far as the 'ethical' interventions of the 1990s are concerned, journalists were active collaborators in writing the script rather than simply colluding with the presentation offered by official sources. The legitimacy of Western military intervention was almost never questioned in the press. In this respect, whatever explanations were adopted in relation to particular conflicts, the key organising idea was that of sovereign inequality.