U.S. Unification Committee issues corrective order for violation of Channel A and MBN 2024 re-approval conditions (comprehensive)

On the 28th, the Korea Media and Communications Commission decided to issue a corrective order to comprehensive programming channels Channel A and MBN for violating the conditions for re-approval in 2024.

At the 46th general meeting on this day, the U.S. Unification Committee raised issues with Channel A's violation of the conditions for appointing an independent auditor and MBN's failure to implement a business plan to improve public responsibility and fairness in broadcasting.

Channel A's CEO also serves as a member of the audit committee. The Unification Committee of the United States deemed this structure to be contrary to the purpose of the re-approval conditions and ordered the CEO to concurrently serve as an audit committee member by the first half of 2027.

MBN did not implement three items of the business plan, including fact-checking reporting on the main news, verifying policies and pledges in collaboration with government agencies during elections, and operating a viewer opinion feedback corner.

MBN claimed that it had supplemented related matters before disposal. Some members expressed the opinion that administrative guidance should be provided instead of issuing a correction order for matters that have already been supplemented, but the majority of the members judged that major items of the business plan had not been implemented and decided to issue a correction order.

Meanwhile, the Korea-U.S. Unification Committee received a proposal to enact guidelines for home shopping operators to discover and foster small and medium-sized business products and support sales channels, as well as an amendment related to deregulation of data home shopping.

The guidelines include reorganizing the support system from product discovery to expansion of sales channels for small and medium-sized businesses, and providing benefits such as additional reductions in product composition ratios to businesses with excellent implementation performance. The standard for the percentage of data area on the first data home shopping screen was relaxed from the current 50% or more to 25% or more.

In addition, a plan to strengthen the standard for initiating factual investigations into restricted activities for deleting floating advertisements from two violations to one violation was reported, as well as an amendment to the 2026 broadcast advertisement bundle sales support notice. The amendment to the bundled sales support notice includes the addition of YTN DMB as a new business eligible for support from the Korea Broadcast Advertising Promotion Agency.