Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Banned in Five Places, Still on the Air in Most Others

article

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Banned in Five Places, Still on the Air in Most Others

No broadcaster in this atlas has drawn as many separate national bans as Peace TV, and each one is a matter of dated public record rather than a single continuous controversy. India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned the channel in December 2012, citing the network's failure to register with Indian regulators and content it judged not conducive to the country's security environment, a full four years before the separate 2016 action against the channel's parent organization. Bangladesh banned the channel in July 2016, days after a terror attack in Dhaka in which investigators reported a connection between one attacker and Naik's online presence, a link Bangladeshi authorities cited directly in their broadcast ban.

The United Kingdom's regulatory record is the most extensively documented, because Ofcom, its broadcasting regulator, issues formal published rulings. Ofcom found the channel in breach of content standards in 2012 over statements concerning apostasy, and again in July 2019 over three separate programs found to breach the regulator's hate speech rules. Peace TV surrendered its UK broadcast licence in 2020, following a 300,000 pound fine, rather than continue contesting the finding. Sri Lanka ordered cable operators to remove the channel in May 2019 following the Easter Sunday bombings that year, and Canada banned it in November 2022.

None of these actions removed Peace TV from the air. The network continues broadcasting from its original Dubai base, reaching an estimated 200 million viewers in the many countries that have not restricted it, and remains accessible by app even in some jurisdictions where terrestrial or cable carriage has been withdrawn. What the regulatory record shows is not a network shut down but a network whose reach is now defined almost as much by where it has been excluded as by where it still broadcasts freely.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.