BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, States Ofcom
The BBC engaged in a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a prime-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our code, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father held a post in the Hamas-run administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the potential to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the date and language are determined."
