BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Media Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "Our probe determined that the film's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father served in a position in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to erode the significantly high levels of confidence that the public 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 family links came to light, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry determined it breached the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
