British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Documentary Ruled a 'Serious' Infringement of Media Regulations, States Ofcom
The British broadcaster committed a "serious breach" of industry standards by omitting to mention that the presenter of a documentary about Gaza was the child of a Hamas official, according to regulatory body Ofcom.
An investigation by Ofcom into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had earlier expressed regret, stating there had been "a major oversight in relation to factual correctness".
The authority has instructed the corporation to transmit a peak-time statement about its conclusions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our code, we are instructing the broadcaster to transmit a message of our findings against it on the BBC's second channel at nine o'clock in the evening, with a timing to be finalised," the statement read.
'Potential to Undermine Confidence'
The regulator's statement stated: "Our investigation determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's parent held a post in the Hamas-controlled administration was materially misleading.
"It meant that the public did not have critical information which may have been extremely pertinent to their judgment of the presenter and the information he presented.
"Credibility is at the heart of the bond between a media organization and its viewers, especially for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the possibility to undermine the very considerable degrees of trust that the public would have put in a documentary produced by the BBC about the Gaza conflict."
The programme was pulled from iPlayer in last February after the presenter's personal associations were revealed, and in this past July an corporation's own inquiry concluded it infringed the organization's editorial guidelines on factual correctness.
A corporation official said: "The authority's determination is in agreement with the results of the internal assessment, that there was a serious error in the documentary in relation to the corporation's content standards on accuracy, which corresponds to clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we accept the regulator's ruling in complete. We will comply with the sanction as soon as the schedule and wording are finalised."
