British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Standards, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The British broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The regulator has instructed the broadcaster to air a prime-time declaration about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's father served in a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the content he provided.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have invested in a BBC factual programme about the Israel-Gaza war."
The film was withdrawn from the online platform in last February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in the month of July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it violated the corporation's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A corporation official stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in complete. We will follow the directive as soon as the date and wording are determined."
