British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The regulator's announcement said: "Our probe found that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to damage the exceptionally strong levels of credibility that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
