British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster committed a "major breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The authority's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian occupied a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
