By Pascal Oparada
Nwaibukwu had on a column on The Punch newspaper accused the television station of becoming a mouthpiece of the Nigerian government.
In her column titled ‘TheNTA-nisation of Channels TV’, Nwabuikwu said programmes on Channels have been lately tailored to favour the government.
Citing a video interview that aide to President Buhari, Femi Adesina, granted Channels about the killing of Nigerian soldiers in the Northeast, Nwabuikwu said the television station edited out a critical aspect of the interview.
“Then last week happened. Over 100 soldiers were killed by Boko Haram. In the process of dismissing the deaths on Channels TV’s Politics Today hosted by Seun Okinbaloye, Femi Adesina reportedly claimed countries around the world usually don’t release the names of dead soldiers, or implied words to that effect. Foreign journalists began to disprove Adesina’s claims almost immediately. Even at that, I shrugged Adesina’s comments off,” Nwabuikwu wrote.
“However, by Tuesday, the story was different. There were claims that Adesina’s interview uploaded online had been edited to remove the controversial parts. Now, this is a new low for Nigeria’s supposedly best TV station. I am not surprised about the station trying to outdo NTA as a better promoter of the government, contrary to their mission statement,” She said.
But Channels Television reacted and said a glitch caused the video to appear to be edited. It said the article was “false, misleading, fraudulent and a figment of the imagination of the writer and her sponsors.”
“Our Political Desk had invited Mr Adesina for a live interview on November 23, 2018. As it is customary, the web department posted the video on our online platforms after the programme. In so doing, some part of the videos which were cut in bytes of 10 minutes overlapped during the upload and suffered a glitch. There was no motive on the part of the web department to hide anything as the programme was broadcast live in the first place and the remarks in question had already been tweeted by the Channels web department. Surely, if we had something to hide, we wouldn’t have posted or tweeted the video at all.
“When Channels was alerted to the glitch, the web department re-posted the video immediately and this has been up on our website and YouTube channel since Monday, November 26.” Channels said.
It said Nwabuikwu did not understand the issues at stake but choose to latch on to the claims on social media and went on to malign the station’s integrity.
“We will not hesitate to use all within our means to seek legal redress against anyone who chooses to malign us or bring our media organisation to disrepute,” Channels said.