British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent occupied a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to undermine the significantly high amounts of trust that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it violated the broadcaster's content policies 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 serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are determined."
