BBC Gaza Programme Ruled a 'Major' Infringement of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "significant breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a film about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has ordered the BBC to broadcast a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Potential to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's lack of disclosure that the presenter's parent served in a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the significantly high amounts of trust that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the conflict in Gaza."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
