British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's statement declared: "Our investigation determined that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the significantly high levels of trust that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
