BBC Gaza Programme Considered a 'Serious' Violation of Media Regulations, States Broadcasting Watchdog
The public service broadcaster committed a "significant breach" of broadcasting rules by not revealing that the voice of a programme about the Gaza situation was the son of a Hamas official, as ruled by UK media regulator Ofcom.
An investigation by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "significantly deceptive".
The chief executive of the broadcaster had previously apologised, noting there had been "a significant failing in relation to accuracy".
The authority has directed the broadcaster to broadcast a evening announcement about its decisions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our rules, we are ordering the broadcaster to transmit a announcement of our findings against it on BBC2 at 21:00, with a schedule to be determined," it said.
'Possibility to Undermine Credibility'
The watchdog's statement declared: "Our investigation found that the programme's failure to disclose that the voice's father served in a post in the Hamas-run authority was substantially inaccurate.
"This implied that the viewers did not have essential details which may have been extremely pertinent to their assessment of the narrator and the information he presented.
"Confidence is at the core of the connection between a television network and its public, notably for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This error had the risk to undermine the very considerable amounts of credibility that audiences would have invested in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The programme was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in last February after the narrator's personal associations came to light, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment concluded it infringed the broadcaster's editorial guidelines on accuracy.
A BBC spokesperson said: "The Ofcom ruling is in agreement with the findings of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on factual correctness, which corresponds to regulation 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in full. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the date and wording are finalised."
