British Broadcasting Corporation Gaza Programme Considered a 'Major' Breach of Broadcasting Rules, Declares UK Media Regulator
The British broadcaster was found to have committed a "serious breach" of media regulations by failing to disclose that the voice of a film about Gaza was the son of a Hamas representative, as ruled by British broadcasting authority Ofcom.
An probe by the broadcasting watchdog into the programme Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone has found that the programme was "materially misleading".
The BBC's director general had previously apologised, saying there had been "a serious error in relation to truthfulness".
The authority has instructed the BBC to air a prime-time announcement about its decisions.
"Given this constitutes a significant violation of our rules, we are instructing the broadcaster to air 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 regulator stated.
'Risk to Erode Confidence'
The authority's report declared: "Our probe determined that the documentary's omission to reveal that the narrator's father occupied a post in the Hamas-controlled government was materially misleading.
"Consequently that the public did not have vital facts which may have been highly relevant to their evaluation of the narrator and the details he shared.
"Confidence is at the heart of the relationship between a media organization and its public, particularly for a national broadcasting corporation such as the British Broadcasting Corporation.
"This oversight had the risk to erode the very considerable amounts of confidence that audiences would have invested in a factual film from the broadcaster about the Israel-Gaza war."
The documentary was withdrawn from the BBC's streaming service in February after the presenter's family links were revealed, and in July an broadcaster's internal assessment found it violated the organization's editorial guidelines on truthfulness.
A representative for the broadcaster said: "The authority's determination is in accordance with the results of the corporation's inquiry, that there was a significant failing in the film in relation to the broadcaster's journalistic policies on accuracy, which reflects clause 2.2 of Ofcom's Broadcasting Code.
"We issued an apology for this and we comply with the regulator's ruling in its entirety. We will comply with the directive as soon as the schedule and wording are confirmed."
