British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has instructed the BBC to air a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our code, we are directing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the film's omission to reveal that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
