British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are determined."
