British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Ruled a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Declares UK Media Regulator
The public service broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas administrator, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by Ofcom into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, noting there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has directed the BBC to broadcast a evening statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to broadcast a statement of our conclusions against it on the BBC's second channel at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the regulator stated.
'Possibility to Damage Confidence'
The authority's announcement said: "Our investigation concluded that the documentary's omission to reveal that the voice's parent held a role in the Hamas-administered authority was substantially inaccurate.
"Consequently that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their assessment of the voice and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a television network and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to damage the very considerable degrees of confidence that viewers would have placed in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The film was pulled from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The regulator's decision is in accordance with the results of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the timing and language are confirmed."
