British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Film Deemed a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Standards, Says Ofcom
The public service broadcaster was found to have committed a "significant breach" of industry standards by not revealing that the presenter of a documentary about the Gaza conflict was the son of a Hamas official, according to British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An inquiry by the broadcasting watchdog into Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The BBC's director general had already issued an apology, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to broadcast a peak-time declaration about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a statement of our determinations against it on BBC Two at 9pm, with a schedule to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Erode Trust'
The regulator's statement declared: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's lack of disclosure that the narrator's parent served in a position in the Hamas-run administration was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have vital facts which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Credibility is at the center of the bond between a broadcaster and its audience, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the public broadcaster.
"This failing had the risk to erode the exceptionally strong degrees of trust that audiences would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in February after the presenter's familial connections came to light, and in this past July an internal BBC review concluded it breached the broadcaster's journalistic standards on accuracy.
A corporation official stated: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the programme in relation to the BBC's Editorial Guidelines on truthfulness, which aligns with Rule 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We have apologised for this and we agree with the authority's determination in full. We will follow the penalty as soon as the date and wording are confirmed."
