Burkina Faso's media regulator has decided to suspend French news channel LCI for three months after a journalist's comments on the situation regarding jihadist violence were described as "false information."
LCI's programs "are suspended for a period of three months in Burkina Faso on all pay-TV service providers' packages, effective immediately upon notification of this decision," said the Higher Council for Communication (CSC) in a statement released on Thursday, June 27.
According to the CSC, LCI, the TF1 group's private 24-hour news channel, "broadcast a program entitled +24h Pujadas, l'info en question+ on April 25, 2023, during which its journalist, Abnousse Shalmani, provided a number of reports on the security crisis in the Sahel in general, but also on Burkina Faso.".
The CSC criticizes the journalist in particular for stating that "jihadists are advancing rapidly in the absence of any state presence in the conquered localities," for specifying, without citing any sources, "that 40% of the territory is occupied by jihadists," , and that "nearly 90,000 civilians known as Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland (VDP) are being used as cannon fodder to protect the Burkinabe military against terrorists."
The regulatory authority considers these statements to be "mere speculation and malicious insinuations," some of which "are likely to cause unrest among the population and undermine the necessary cooperation between the army and civilians for the protection of the Burkinabe homeland."
In early April, the authorities in Burkina Faso expelled the correspondents of the French daily newspapers Libération and Le Monde. Libération had just published an investigation into the alleged executions of young people in a barracks.
At the end of March, they ordered the indefinite suspension of the France 24 television channel, after suspending Radio France Internationale (RFI) in December 2022, French public media accused of relaying messages from jihadist leaders.
However, the government had given assurances that it remained "fundamentally committed" to freedom of expression and opinion.