BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Media Rules, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's report stated: "The inquiry we conducted found that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's father held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the relationship between a television network and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to damage the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
