BBC Gaza Documentary Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster engaged in a "major breach" of media regulations by not revealing that the presenter of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, according to UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has ordered the BBC to transmit a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"As this represents a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the corporation to air a statement of our determinations against it on BBC2 at 9pm, with a date to be determined," the statement read.
'Possibility to Damage Trust'
The regulator's announcement stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a role in the Hamas-controlled authority was materially misleading.
"It meant that the viewers did not have critical information which may have been very significant to their evaluation of the narrator and the information he provided.
"Trust is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its viewers, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This error had the risk to undermine the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a BBC factual programme about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections emerged, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment determined it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the findings of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a major oversight in the documentary in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on factual correctness, which reflects Rule 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in complete. We will follow the sanction as soon as the date and language are finalised."
