BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "major breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the voice of a film about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas representative, as determined by regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to air a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the narrator's father held a role in the Hamas-administered administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the voice and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was withdrawn from the online platform in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we comply with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
