THE NAMIBIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION CHAT SHOWS CONTINUE UNCHANGED

Cabinet has announced on Friday, 31 July 2009 that the Namibian national broadcaster, NBC will continue monitoring and evaluating the content of its phone-in programmes.

As reported in the daily newspaper, The Namibian on the 03 August 2009, the NBC made drastic, and controversial, changes to these radio programmes earlier this year to prevent what it called abuse of the right to freedom of speech.

During its latest session, Cabinet noted that during a three-week monitoring period no problems were experienced with the phone-in programmes after the drastic changes and that once the proposed infrastructure has been put in place and the necessary training has been conducted, “the NBC will be better equipped to handle phone-in programmes”.

Cabinet noted that the “NBC management had agreed to maintain the current status quo and that careful monitoring and content evaluation of phone-in programmes will continue.” The NBC has over the past few years experienced various problems related to the abuse of the airwaves by callers on its radio stations, particularly National Radio and the Oshiwambo Service.

In March this year, the NBC management reduced the frequency of phone-in programmes on national radio to once a day from 20h00 to 21h00 on weekdays. The Oshiwambo radio service has to broadcast its phone-in programme on the same days and at the same time. The times and frequency of phone-in programmes on the other language services remained unchanged.

The NBC warned that it would monitor the programmes and that they would be removed from the air if the measures were ineffective. In addition, all radio stations broadcast educational content on freedom of expression and panel discussions on defamation, slander, insinuation and freedom of expression.

The NBC also reviewed its internal guidelines on phone-in programmes, screened incoming calls and increased the delay between receiving the call and broadcasting it to the maximum 8 seconds.

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