British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The BBC was found to have committed a "significant breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a documentary about Gaza was the offspring of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the broadcaster to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to 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 schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's report stated: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's father served in a role in the Hamas-run administration was materially misleading.
"This implied that the public did not have essential details which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its public, particularly for a state-funded media outlet such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the potential to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections emerged, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it breached the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
