Mali suspends broadcasting of LCI channel for two months

The military-dominated authorities in Mali decided on Saturday, August 24, to suspend the LCI news channel for two months after, according to them, “false accusations” of a consultant against the Malian army and its Russian allies. “LCI television services are withdrawn from the packages of all distributors of authorized radio or television broadcasting services in Mali for a period of two months” from August 23, 2024, announced the Malian High Authority for Communication (HAC).

According to the HAC, the private continuous news channel of the TF1 group broadcast a program on July 27 entitled “Wagner decimated in Mali: the hand of kyiv” with Colonel Michel Goya, military consultant of LCI, as guest. The HAC accuses Colonel Goya of having pronounced “disparaging remarks, gratuitous assertions and false accusations of abuses against the Malian armed forces and their Russian partners.” She adds that the guest also called “to openly support terrorism under the pretext of supporting Ukraine against Russia.”

The junta in Mali broke its long-standing alliance with France and its European partners in 2022 to turn militarily and politically towards Moscow. Since then, Malian colonels have suspended the widely followed French media outlets France 24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI). France 2 was also suspended in early 2024. Correspondents from a number of foreign media outlets have also been forced to leave, go into exile or remain silent due to being unable to work.

In Burkina Faso and Niger, neighbors of Mali, soldiers also seized power by force in 2022 and 2023 and took measures against the foreign press. In Burkina Faso, LCI was suspended in June 2023 after a journalist’s comments on the situation related to jihadist violence, described as “fake news”.