BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC engaged in a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the documentary was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has ordered the broadcaster to air a prime-time declaration about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the corporation to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a schedule to be confirmed," it said.
'Risk to Damage Trust'
The regulator's statement said: "The inquiry we conducted concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the presenter's parent held a post in the Hamas-administered authority was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the presenter and the details he shared.
"Trust is at the heart of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The film was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it breached the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A corporation official commented: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the corporation's content standards on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of the authority's broadcasting regulations.
"We have apologised for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the penalty as soon as the date and language are determined."
