THE National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has suspended Channels Television, asking the station to pay N5 million fine for breaching the broadcast code.
This was contained in a letter by the NBC Acting Director-General Armstrong Idachaba on Monday.
Idachaba complained about the Channels’ 7 pm live broadcast programme of Sunday, April 25, 2021.
NBC told the Managing Director of Channels TV that the TV station erred by allowing a leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) to make secessionist and inciting declarations without caution.
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The regulator accused the news channel of allowing the guest speaker to make derogatory, false and misleading statements about the Nigerian Army, despite being proscribed by a court of law.
In October 2020, the agency imposed a sanction of N3 million each on Channels Television, African Independent Television (AIT), and Arise TV for gross violation of the broadcast code, which involved majorly the use of unverifiable online video footages of the #ENDSARS protest on social media.
According to NBC, the fine was based on the revamped NBC Code, describing as unprofessional the conduct of the stations to provide their platforms for the promotion of what it labelled as ‘unverifiable videos’ that could encourage or incite people to crime and lead to public disorder.
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