BBC Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has directed the BBC to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to air a message 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 Trust'
The watchdog's announcement said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong levels of credibility that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's content policies on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a significant failing in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which corresponds to Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the timing and wording are finalised."
