British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are directing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's father held a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the content he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the organization's content policies on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and language are finalised."
