British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent served in a role in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in the month of July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the schedule and language are confirmed."
