British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to air a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Erode Credibility'
The regulator's report stated: "Our investigation concluded that the film's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the center of the connection between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the significantly high degrees of confidence that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was removed from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."
