BBC Gaza Film Deemed a 'Serious' Breach of Media Standards, States UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza situation was the offspring of a Hamas representative, as ruled by regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
Ofcom has instructed the corporation to air a peak-time announcement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the BBC to transmit a message of our findings against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Confidence'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our probe determined that the programme's failure to disclose that the presenter's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-administered government was significantly deceptive.
"It meant that the audience did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the relationship between a media organization and its public, notably for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This oversight had the possibility to damage the significantly high degrees of credibility that viewers would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's familial connections were revealed, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it violated the broadcaster's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A representative for the broadcaster stated: "The regulator's decision is in accordance 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 factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the authority's determination in complete. We will adhere to the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are determined."
