The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has imposed N3 million sanction each on AIT, Channels and Arise News television stations, for alleged violation of broadcasting code in reporting the #EndSARS protests.
NBC Acting Director-General, Armstrong Adachaba, made the disclosure at a news conference on Monday in Abuja.
Mr Idachaba said the sanction would serve as deterrent to broadcasters who did not verify news stories before they broadcast.
He said the commission was concerned about the professional misdemeanour of some broadcasting stations in the past couple of days.
“In line with the provision of section 5.6.9 of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code which states that the broadcaster shall be held liable for any breach of the code emanation from the use of material from User Generated Sources, the commission, therefore, sanctioned Arise TV, Channels TV and AIT in line with the provision of the broadcasting code.
“Channels Television, Arise TV and AIT especially continued to transmit footages obtained from unverified and unauthenticated social media sources.
“No doubt, these pictures stimulated anger and heightened the violence that was witnessed during the #EndSARS crisis.
“If you escalate the violation that have emanated from the misuse of social media sources by broadcasting it will escalate the sanction.
“According to the provision of the law, we can comfortably shut them down because what they are doing is capable of breakdown of law and order.
“No responsible country will sit down and allow any form of media to bring down the country.
“Look at the level of damage and killings that happened on account of unverified news report.
“In line with the provision of the code section B which is heavy fine between N500, 000 to N5 million, we will communicate that to the affected stations depending on the magnitude of breaches.