MTV Banned from Covering Consultations at Baabda

MTV television station announced on Monday that it was banned from covering the parliamentary consultations held at Baabda Presidential Palace to name a new PM for Lebanon.

MTV reporter, Nakhle Odaime, expressed his regret at the presidential palace’s decision to prevent him from covering consultations, saying, "I am surprised and shocked ... for the first time I am prevented from carrying out my journalistic duty in a public place and not in an institution."

The Presidential Palace issued a statement on the matter saying that MTV “station has launched verbal attacks at the President and stripped his official character, naming him without his official title, and went on insulting him and making inappropriate epithets against him.”

The statement said the Presidential Palace made “several efforts to make the TV station reconsider its inappropriate manner but without yielding,” noting that by audiovisual media law, the station’s behavior can be “punishable.”

Calls to boycott and block the channel have increased recently by pro-Free Patriotic Movement figures, mainly after its strong opposing stance regarding the performance of former PM Hassan Diab’s government and the presidential term of President Michel Aoun.

The station did not hesitate to launch a sharp attack and direct harsh criticism of the President after the deadly colossal bombing of the port of Beirut, describing the President as “Mr. Aoun.”

The TV station established in 1991, was closed in 2002 by a court order charging that its broadcasts violated a ban on political propaganda and harmed relations with Syria. It resumed broadcast in 2009.

Activists and journalists on social media, condemned Baabda’s ban of MTV.

Al-Jadeed channel news director Maryam al-Bassam said in a tweet that banning MTV from entering Baabda is an act of “piracy.”