British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Rules, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the corporation to transmit a peak-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our investigation found that the film's omission to reveal that the voice's father served in a position in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
