BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Credibility'
The authority's announcement declared: "Our investigation determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the connection between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to undermine the significantly high degrees of confidence that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an internal BBC review found it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in full. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."
