British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Trust'
The watchdog's statement said: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the voice's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a television network and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
