British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Damage Trust'
The authority's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the boy's family links came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
