British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our probe concluded that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's parent held a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the voice and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the significantly high amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the timing and language are determined."
