BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the BBC to air a announcement of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's announcement declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
