A quarter of a century after the establishment of a regulatory authority for broadcasting in Nigeria, the nation is yet to experience full-scale professional excellence in the gathering, production and transmission of broadcast content. Amateurish reportage and dissemination of stale information, poor signals and hazy pictures as well as general disregard for broadcast rules, laws and ethics are still discernible. Are these deficiencies the handiwork of illegal broadcast stations or the result of poor supervision of legally licensed stations? To react to these posers, this paper undertakes a critical examination of the provisions of the National Broadcasting Commission Act No 38 of 1992 as amended and finds certain inherent defects in the enabling law for the regulation of broadcasting in the country. With the tenets of the Authoritarian Media Theory in mind, the paper opines that except such defects are redressed where they are found to exist, accruable public interest gains from broadcast regulation may never endure in Nigeria