British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Standards, Says UK Media Regulator
The BBC committed a "serious breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the child of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "materially misleading".
The head of the BBC had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The regulator has instructed the corporation to air a evening statement about its decisions.
"As this represents a major infringement of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a date to be finalised," the statement read.
'Risk to Damage Confidence'
The authority's statement stated: "Our investigation concluded that the programme's failure to disclose that the narrator's father served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the audience did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its viewers, particularly for a public service broadcaster such as the public broadcaster.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong levels of confidence that viewers would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from the BBC's streaming service in the month of February after the presenter's familial connections were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry found it infringed the organization's journalistic standards on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson commented: "The regulator's decision is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."