BBC Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Violation of Broadcasting Regulations, Says Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the voice of a programme about the Gaza conflict was the child of a Hamas administrator, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An probe by the media regulator into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has determined that the programme was "substantially inaccurate".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, saying there had been "a significant failing in relation to factual correctness".
Ofcom has directed the broadcaster to air a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Since this amounts to a serious breach of our regulations, we are instructing the BBC to broadcast a statement of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at 21:00, with a date to be finalised," it said.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The watchdog's report declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a role in the Hamas-run authority was significantly deceptive.
"This implied that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their evaluation of the presenter and the information he provided.
"Credibility is at the heart of the connection between a television network and its audience, notably for a public service broadcaster such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to damage the exceptionally strong degrees of credibility that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's family links came to light, and in this past July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it infringed the broadcaster's content policies on truthfulness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the conclusions of Peter Johnston's review, that there was a serious error 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 comply with the authority's determination in its entirety. We will follow the sanction as soon as the schedule and language are finalised."
