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British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, Declares Ofcom
The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the narrator of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to broadcast a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are directing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's report said: "Our investigation found that the documentary's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-run authority was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of credibility that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "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 BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
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