BBC Gaza Film Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Media Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas representative, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "substantially inaccurate".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," it said.
'Potential to Erode Credibility'
The authority's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's failure to disclose that the narrator's father held a position in the Hamas-run government was materially misleading.
"This implied that the audience did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he shared.
"Trust is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its audience, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an internal BBC review determined it breached the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the date and language are determined."
