British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a announcement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian occupied a role in the Hamas-run government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to erode the significantly high levels of credibility that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and language are determined."