British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the corporation to air a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it breached the organization's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
