Liberia Closes Biggest Independent Media Network Just Months Before Elections

The journalists at Spoon FM/Live TV, Fabric FM/Live TV, Super FM/Live TV and Super TV have been denied access to their offices for the past three weeks, ever since dozens of court officers arrived at the Spoon Network compound on 14 July, while Spoon FM/Live TV was broadcasting live, and said they had to stop working under an order isssued by the Montserrado County civil law court closing Stanton Witherspoon’s Spoon Communication Network.

The order depriving the journalists of their jobs and media had been issued in response to a defamation suit by Wilmot Smith, the former acting director-general of the Liberia Institute for Statistics and Geo-Information Service (LISGIS), in connection with their coverage of the accusations of corruption that the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC) had brought against Smith and other senior government officials in June 2022. A few months after these accusations, President George Weah dismissed Smith for “administrative reasons.”