British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's male guardian served in a post in the Hamas-administered authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have vital facts which may have been very significant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the connection between a television network and its audience, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a factual film from the broadcaster about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was removed from the online platform in last February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
