British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Significant' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has ordered the corporation to broadcast a evening declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the corporation to transmit a message of our determinations against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Credibility'
The watchdog's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the narrator's male guardian served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a television network and its public, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We expressed regret for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the penalty as soon as the date and wording are determined."
