British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Media Rules, Says Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had previously apologised, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are directing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The authority's report said: "Our investigation found that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a position in the Hamas-controlled authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the online platform in last February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."
