British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States Ofcom
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the BBC to air a peak-time announcement about its findings.
"Given this constitutes a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a message of our conclusions against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a timing to be determined," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The regulator's statement stated: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father served in a role in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the content he provided.
"Credibility is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to undermine the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the conflict in Gaza."
The film was removed from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's personal associations came to light, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson stated: "The authority's determination is in line with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."