British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, States Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time statement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Trust'
The regulator's report stated: "Our probe found that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its public, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the potential to damage the significantly high levels of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from iPlayer in February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster commented: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the timing and language are determined."
