British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the BBC to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The regulator's report stated: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
