BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Rules, Declares Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An inquiry by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has instructed the BBC to transmit a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are ordering the corporation to broadcast a message of our findings against it on BBC Two at 21:00, with a date to be confirmed," the regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's announcement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian held a role in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the voice and the content he shared.
"Credibility is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, especially for a public service broadcaster such as the BBC.
"This error had the potential to erode the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the corporation's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the film in relation to the corporation's content standards on truthfulness, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the timing and wording are confirmed."
