BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Serious' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has directed the corporation to air a prime-time statement about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to air a message of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement said: "Our probe determined that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-administered government was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the details he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the very considerable degrees of trust that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The documentary was removed from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the corporation's content policies on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in line 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 clause 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we comply with the authority's determination in full. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
