British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the corporation to transmit a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The regulator's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Confidence is at the center of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the risk to damage the very considerable amounts of credibility that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's family links were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
