British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
Ofcom has ordered the BBC to air a evening announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
