Aidoghie Paulinus, Abuja
The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), yesterday, released the breach profile of broadcast stations for the second quarter of 2020.
The report compiled quarterly by the Directorate of Broadcast Monitoring of the NBC is from weekly reports filed by the 10 zonal and 25 state offices of the commission that monitor over 600 functional broadcast stations in the country.
The release by the NBC showed that 716 infractions of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code were sanctioned between April and June 2020.
The NBC said out of the 716 infractions sanctioned, only 22 made up of three percent of the numbers were financial penalty.
“The remaining 694 (97 percent) were either cautions or warnings for obscenity, political, hate speech, unverifiable claims, unprofessionalism, advertisements and technical breaches.
“Advertisement breaches were the dominant infractions for the quarter accounting for 51 percent of all sanctions, followed by unverifiable claims to cure by tradomedics and preachers with 17 percent.
Unprofessionalism, especially in the handling of news and current affairs programming was the third dominant breach accounting for 12 percent of all infractions recorded, the NBC said.
The commission further said 22 penalties were imposed on 19 stations across the country during the quarter ranging from the sum of N250,000 to N300,000 each.
“Seven of these were for misinformation or false health advisory about Coronavirus (COVID-19). Stations penalized in this respect were Breeze FM, Lafia, Adaba FM Akure, Midland FM Ilorin, Royal FM Ilorin and Wave FM Port Harcourt.
“Ten stations were penalised for tradomedics’ claim to cure serious diseases or promotion of fortune telling, namely; Sobi FM, Ilorin; EBS Radio, Benin; City FM Onitsha; FRCN (Voice FM), Nsukka; King FM, Ibadan; Fad FM, Calabar; Wazobia Max TV Port Harcourt and Radio Rivers Port Harcourt. Penalised for endorsement of products or services by presenters were Wish FM Port Harcourt, Wazobia FM, Port Harcourt and People’s FM, Yenegoa.”
