British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Infringement of Media Standards, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as determined by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the corporation to transmit a prime-time announcement about its findings.
"As this represents a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Trust'
The regulator's report declared: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent occupied a position in the Hamas-administered administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a media organization and its audience, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong amounts of trust that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from iPlayer in the month of February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in the month of July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement 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 accuracy, which reflects regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
