British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled 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 documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the presenter's father occupied a post in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its viewers, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an internal BBC review concluded it violated the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
