BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the documentary was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the broadcaster to broadcast a evening declaration about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a major infringement of our regulations, we are ordering the BBC to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be determined," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Erode Trust'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation found that the film's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the content he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the online platform in February after the presenter's family links emerged, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 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 follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
