British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about Gaza was the son 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 already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to air a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The authority's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the voice's parent held a position in the Hamas-administered government was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
