BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Rules, Says UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by omitting to mention that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into the documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has concluded that the film was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had already issued an apology, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to accuracy".
The authority has ordered the broadcaster to transmit a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"Since this amounts to a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Damage Credibility'
The authority's statement said: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the presenter's male guardian occupied a position in the Hamas-run government was substantially inaccurate.
"It meant that the audience did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their judgment of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Confidence is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, especially for a state-funded media outlet such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the potential to undermine the very considerable amounts of trust that the public would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in July an corporation's own inquiry determined it infringed the corporation's content policies on accuracy.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the conclusions of the internal assessment, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which aligns with regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we agree with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are confirmed."
