BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Breach of Media Standards, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to air a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our probe found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the potential to erode the significantly high amounts of credibility that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in July an internal BBC review found it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"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 date and language are confirmed."
