British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Media Standards, Declares Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The watchdog's report said: "Our probe found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the presenter's father occupied a role in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of confidence that viewers would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed 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 violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are determined."