BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a serious breach of our code, we are ordering the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's statement said: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the voice and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from the online platform in last February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "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 factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
