British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Deemed a 'Significant' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Declares Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by failing to disclose that the narrator of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as determined by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An inquiry by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
The regulator has instructed the BBC to air a peak-time declaration about its findings.
"As this represents a major infringement of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our conclusions against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be confirmed," the statement read.
'Risk to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's report stated: "Our probe concluded that the programme's omission to reveal that the voice's father occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was significantly deceptive.
"Consequently that the public did not have critical information which may have been highly relevant to their assessment of the narrator and the details he provided.
"Trust is at the core of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the BBC.
"This failing had the possibility to erode the very considerable degrees of credibility that audiences would have placed in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was removed from iPlayer in the month of February after the narrator's family links emerged, and in the month of July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the broadcaster's journalistic standards on truthfulness.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in line with the conclusions of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a major oversight in the programme in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on truthfulness, which reflects regulation 2.2 of the regulator's media standards.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with Ofcom's decision in its entirety. We will adhere to the directive as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
