British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's announcement said: "The inquiry we conducted found that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
