British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Significant' Breach of Media Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The BBC was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, noting there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a timing to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The watchdog's report said: "Our probe concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the voice's parent served in a post in the Hamas-controlled government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the content he presented.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the significantly high amounts of confidence that viewers would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections came to light, and in July an internal BBC review determined it infringed the organization's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We expressed regret for this and we accept the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and language are confirmed."